CRUEL MIRACLES
                     Short stories by Orson Scott Card

                             v1.1 (Jan-30-2000)
   If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version
                      number by 0.1 and redistribute.

CONTENTS

Mortal Gods
Jan 1979, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Saving Grace
Night Cry 2:5, 1987

Eye for Eye
March 1987, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine

St. Amy's Tale
Dec. 1980, Omni

Kingsmeat
Analog Yearbook, ed. Ben Bova (Baronet, 1978)

Holy
New Dimensions 10, ed. Robert Silverberg (Harper & Row, 1980)

MORTAL GODS

The  first contact  was peaceful,  almost uneventful: sudden  landings near
government buildings  all over  the world, brief discussions  in the native
languages,  followed  by  treaties allowing  the  aliens  to build  certain
buildings  in  certain  places in  exchange  for  certain favors--  nothing
spectacular. The technological improvements  that the aliens brought helped
make life better for everyone, but they were improvements that were already
well within the reach of human engineers within the next decade or two. And
the greatest  gift of all was found to  be a disappointment-- space travel.
The  aliens  did  not  have  faster-than-light travel.  Instead,  they  had
conclusive proof that faster-than-light travel was utterly impossible. They
had infinite  patience and incredibly  long lives to sustain  them in their
snail's-pace crawl  among the stars,  but humans would be  dead before even
the shortest space flight was fairly begun.

And after only a little while, the presence of aliens was regarded as quite
the normal  thing. They insisted that  they had no further  gifts to bring,
and simply  exercised their treaty rights to  build and visit the buildings
they had made.

The  buildings were  all different from  each other,  but had one  thing in
common: by  the standards  of the local  populace, the new  alien buildings
were all clearly recognizable as churches.

Mosques.  Cathedrals.   Shrines.  Synagogues.   Temples.  All  unmistakably
churches.

But no congregation was invited, though any person who came to such a place
was  welcomed by  whatever aliens  happened to  be there  at the  time, who
engaged  in  charming  discussion  totally  related  to  the  person's  own
interests.  Farmers conversed  about farming, engineers  about engineering,
housewives  about  motherhood,   dreamers  about  dreams,  travelers  about
travels, astronomers  about the stars. Those who  came and talked went away
feeling good. Feeling that  someone did, indeed, attach importance to their
lives-- had  come trillions of kilometers  through incredible boredom (five
hundred years in space, they said!) just to see them.

And gradually life settled into a peaceful routine. Scientists, it is true,
kept  on discovering,  and engineers  kept on  building according  to those
discoveries, and  so changes  did come. But  knowing now that  there was no
great scientific revolution just around the corner, no tremendous discovery
that would open up  the stars, men and women settled down, by and large, to
the business of being happy.

It wasn't as hard as people had supposed.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Willard Crane was an  old man, but a content one. His wife was dead, but he
did not  resent the brief interregnum in his life  in which he was solitary
again, a thing he had not been since he came home from the Vietnam War with
half a  foot missing and found his girl waiting for  him anyway, foot or no
foot. They  had lived all their married lives in a  house in the Avenues of
Salt  Lake  City,  which,  when  they  moved  there,  had  been  a  shabby,
dilapidated  relic of  a  previous century,  but which  now was  a splendid
preservation  of  a  noble   era  in  architecture.  Willard  was  in  that
comfortable area between heavy  wealth and heavier poverty; enough money to
satisfy  normal  aspirations,  but   not  enough  money  to  tempt  him  to
extravagance.

Every day  he walked from 7th Avenue and L Street  to the cemetery, not far
away,  where practically  everyone had  been buried.  It was there,  in the
middle of the cemetery, that the alien building stood-- an obvious mimic of
old Mormon temple architecture, meaning it was a monstrosity of conflicting
periods  that somehow,  perhaps  through intense  sincerity, managed  to be
beautiful anyway.

And  there he  sat  among the  gravestones, watching  as  occasional people
wandered  into and  out of  the sanctuary  where the aliens  came, visited,
left.

Happiness  is boring  as hell,  he decided  one day.  And so, to  provoke a
little  delightful  variety, he  decided  to  pick a  fight with  somebody.
Unfortunately, everyone  he knew at all well was too  nice to fight. And so
he decided that he had a bone to pick with the aliens.

When you're old, you can get away with anything.

He went to the alien temple and walked inside.

On the  walls were  murals, paintings, maps;  on the floor,  pedestals with
statues; it seemed more  a museum than anything else. There were few places
to sit,  and he saw no  sign of aliens. Which  wouldn't be a disaster; just
deciding on a good  argument had been variety enough, noting with pride the
fine quality of the work the aliens had chosen to display.

But there was an alien there, after all.

"Good morning, Mr. Crane," said the alien.

"How the hell you know my name?"

"You perch on a  tombstone every morning and watch as people come in and go
out. We  found you fascinating. We asked  around." The alien's voicebox was
very well programmed-- a  warm, friendly, interested voice. And Willard was
too old and jaded  with novelty to get much excited about the way the alien
slithered  along the  floor and  slopped on  the bench  next to him  like a
large, self-moving piece of seaweed.

"We wished you would come in."

"I'm in."

"And why?"

Now  that the question  was put, his  reaso seemed  trivial to him;  but he
decided to play the game all'the way through. Why not, after all? "I have a
bone to pick with you."

"Heavens," said the alien, with mock horror.

"I have some questions that have never been answered to my satisfaction."

"Then I trust we'll have some answers."

"All right  then." But what were his questions?  "You'll have to forgive me
if my mind gets screwed around. The brain dies first, as you know."

"We know."

"Why'd you build a temple here? How come you build churches?"

"Why, Mr. Crane, we've answered that a thousand times. We like churches. We
find them the most graceful and beautiful of all human architecture."

"I don't believe you," Willard said. "You're dodging my question. So let me
put it  another way. How come  you have the time to  sit around and talk to
half-assed imbeciles like me? Haven't you got anything better to do?"

"Human beings are unusually  good company. It's a most pleasant way to pass
the time  which does,  after many years,  weigh rather heavily  on our, um,
hands."  And the  alien tried  to gesture  with his pseudopodia,  which was
amusing, and Willard laughed.

"Slippery bastards,  aren't you?" he inquired,  and the alien chuckled. "So
let me put it  this way, and no dodging, or I'll know you have something to
hide. You're pretty much like us, right? You have the same gadgets, but you
can travel  in space because you don't croak after  a hundred years like we
do;  whatever, you  do  pretty much  the same  kinds of  things we  do. And
yet-yet--"

"There's always an 'and yet,'" the alien sighed.

"And yet.  You come all the way out here,  which ain't exactly Main Street,
Milky Way,  and all you do  is build these churches  all over the place and
sit around  and jaw  with whoever the  hell comes in. Makes  no sense, sir,
none at all."

The alien oozed gently toward him. "Can you keep a secret?"

"My old lady  thought she was the only woman I ever  slept with in my life.
Some secrets I can keep."

"Then here is one to keep. We come, Mr. Crane, to worship."

"Worship who?"

"Worship, among others, you."

Willard laughed  long and loud, but  the alien looked (as  only aliens can)
terribly earnest and sincere.

"Listen, you mean to tell me that you worship people?"

"Oh, yes. It is  the dream of everyone who dares to dream on my home planet
to come  here and  meet a human  being or two  and then live  on the memory
forever."

And suddenly  it wasn't funny to Willard  anymore. He looked around-- human
art in  prominent display, the  whole format, the choice  of churches. "You
aren't joking."

"No, Mr.  Crane. We've wandered  the galaxy for several  million years, all
told, meeting new races  and renewing acquaintance with old. Evolution is a
tedious old  highway-- carbon-based  life always leads  to certain patterns
and certain  forms, despite  the fact that  we seem hideously  different to
you--"

"Not too bad, Mister, a little ugly, but not too bad--"

"All the--  people like us that you've seen-- well,  we don't come from the
same planet, though it has been assumed so by your scientists. Actually, we
come from  thousands of  planets. Separate, independent  evolution, leading
inexorably to us. Absolutely,  or nearly absolutely, uniform throughout the
galaxy. We are the natural endproduct of evolution."

"So we're the oddballs."

"You might  say so.  Because somewhere along  the line, Mr.  Crane, deep in
your past, your planet's  evolution went astray from the normal. It created
something utterly new."

"Sex?"

"We all  have sex, Mr. Crane.  Without it, how in  the world could the race
improve? No, what was new on your planet, Mr. Crane, was death."

The word was not  an easy one for Willard to hear. His wife had, after all,
meant a great deal to him. And he meant even more to himself. Death already
loomed in  dizzy spells and shortened breath  and weariness that refused to
turn into sleep.

"Death?"

"We don't  die, Mr. Crane. We reproduce by  splitting off whole sections of
ourselves with identical DNA-- you know about DNA?"

"I went to college."

"And  with  us,  of  course,  as  with  all  other life  in  the  universe,
intelligence is carried on the DNA, not in the brain. One of the byproducts
of death,  the brain  is. We don't  have it. We split,  and the individual,
complete with  all memories, lives on  in the children, who  are made up of
the actual flesh of my flesh, you see? I will never die."

"Well,  bully  for  you,"  Willard  said, feeling  strangely  cheated,  and
wondering why he hadn't guessed.

"And so we came here and found people whose life had a finish; who began as
unformed  creatures without  memory  and, after  an incredibly  brief span,
died."

"And for that you worship us? I might as well go worshiping bugs that die a
few minutes after they're born."

The alien chuckled, and Willard resented it.

"Is that why you come here? To gloat?"

"What  else  would we  worship,  Mr.  Crane? While  we  don't discount  the
possibility of invisible gods,  we really never have invented any. We never
died, so  why dream of immortality? Here we found a  people who knew how to
worship, and  for the  first time we  found awakened in  us a  desire to do
homage to superior beings."

And Willard  noticed his heartbeat,  realized that it would  stop while the
alien had no heart, had nothing that would ever end. "Superior, hell."

"We,"  said the alien,  "remember everything,  from the first  stirrings of
intellect to the present.  When we are 'born,' so to speak, we have no need
of teachers.  We have never learned  to write-- merely to  exchange RNA. We
have never  learned to create  beauty to outlast our  lives because nothing
outlasts our lives. We  live to see all our works crumble. Here, Mr. Crane,
we  have found  a  race that  builds for  the sheer  joy of  building, that
creates beauty,  that writes  books, that invents the  lives of never-known
people  to delight  others who  know they  are being  lied to, a  race that
devises  immortal gods  to worship  and celebrates  its own  mortality with
immense pomp and glory.  Death is the foundation of all that is great about
humanity, Mr. Crane."

"Like hell  it is,"  said Willard. "I'm  about to die,  and there's nothing
great about it."

"You don't  really believe that, Mr.  Crane," the alien said.  "None of you
do. Your lives are built around death, glorifying it. Postponing it as long
as possible, to be sure, but glorifying it. In the earliest literature, the
death of the hero is the moment of greatest climax. The most potent myth."

"Those poems weren't written  by old men with flabby bodies and hearts that
only beat when they feel like it."

"Nonsense. Everything  you do  smacks of death. Your  poems have beginnings
and endings, and structures that limit the work. Your paintings have edges,
marking off  where the  beauty begins and  ends. Your sculptures  isolate a
moment in time. Your music starts and finishes. All that you do is mortal--
it is  all born.  It all dies.  And yet you struggle  against mortality and
have overcome it, building up tremendous stores of shared knowledge through
your finite books and your finite words. You put frames on everything."

"Mass insanity,  then. But it  explains nothing about why  you worship. You
must come here to mock us."

"Not to mock you. To envy you."

"Then die. I assume that your protoplasm or whatever is vulnerable."

"You don't  understand. A human  being can die-- after  he has reproduced--
and all that he  knew and all that he has will live  on after him. But if I
die,  I   cannot  reproduce.   My  knowledge  dies  with   me.  An  awesome
responsibility. We  cannot assume it.  I am all the  paintings and writings
and  songs  of a  million  generations.  To die  would  be the  death of  a
civilization. You have cast yourselves free of life and achieved greatness.

"And that's why you come here."

"If ever there were  gods. If ever there was power in the universe. You are
those gods. You have that power."

"We have no power."

"Mr. Crane, you are beautiful."

And the old man  shook his head, stood with difficulty, and doddered out of
the temple and walked away slowly among the graves.

"You  tell them  the truth,"  said the  alien to  no one in  particular (to
future generations of himself who would need the memory of the words having
been spoken), "and it only makes it worse."

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was  only seven months later, and the weather  was no longer spring, but
now blustered  with the icy wind of late autumn.  The trees in the cemetery
were no  longer colorful; they were stripped of all  but the last few brown
leaves. And  into the  cemetery walked Willard  Crane again, his  arms half
enclosed by  the metal crutches that gave him, in  his old age, four points
of balance instead of  the precarious two that had served him for more than
ninety years.  A few snowflakes were drifting  lazily down, except when the
wind snatched  them and spun them  in crazy dances that  had neither rhythm
nor direction.

Willard laboriously climbed the steps of the temple.

Inside, an alien was waiting.

"I'm Willard Crane," the old man said.

"And I'm  an alien.  You spoke to  me-- or my  parent, however  you wish to
phrase it-- several months ago."

"Yes."

"We knew you'd come back."

"Did you? I vowed I never would."

"But  we know  you. You  are well  known to  us all,  Mr. Crane.  There are
billions of  gods on  Earth for us to  worship, but you are  the noblest of
them all."

"I am?"

"Because  only you have  thought to do  us the  kindest gift. Only  you are
willing to let us watch your death."

And a tear leaped from the old man's eye as he blinked heavily.

"Is that why I came?"

"Isn't it?"

"I  thought I  came to  damn your  souls to  hell, that's  why I  came, you
bastards, coming to taunt me in the final hours of my life."

"You came to us."

"I wanted to show you how ugly death is."

"Please. Do."

And, seemingly  eager to  oblige them, Willard's  heart stopped and  he, in
brief agony, slumped to the floor in the temple.

The  aliens all  slithered in,  all gathered  around closely,  watching him
rattle for breath.

"I will  not die!"  he savagely whispered,  each breath an  agony, his face
fierce with the heroism of struggle.

And then his body shuddered and he was still.

The aliens knelt there for hours in silent worship as the body became cold.
And then,  at last,  because they had  learned this from  their gods-- that
words must be said to be remembered-- one of them spoke:

"Beautiful," he said tenderly. "Oh Lord my God," he said worshipfully.

And they were gnawed within by the grief of knowing that this greatest gift
of all gifts was forever out of their reach.

SAVING GRACE

And he  looked into her  eyes, and lo! when  her gaze fell upon  him he did
verity turn to stone, for her visage was wondrous ugly. Praise the Lord.

Mother  came home  depressed as  hell with  a bag  full of groceries  and a
headache fit to turn her hair turn to snakes. Billy, he knew when Mommy was
like that,  he could tell as  soon as she grumped  through the living room.
But if  she was  full of hellfire,  he had the  light of heaven,  and so he
said, "Don't be sad, Mother, Jesus loves you."

Mother  put the  margarine  into the  fridge and  wiped the  graham cracker
crumbs off  the table and dumped them in the  sink even though the disposal
hadn't worked for years. "Billy," she said quietly, "you been saved again?"

"I only was just going to look inside."

"Ought to sue those  bastards. Burn down their tent or something. Why can't
they do their show from a studio like everybody else?"

"I felt  my sins  just weighing me down  and then he reached  out and Jesus
come into my heart and I had to be baptized."

At the  word baptized, Mommy  slammed the kitchen counter.  The mixing bowl
bounced. "Not again, you damn near got pneumonia the last time!"

"This time I dried my hair."

"It isn't sanitary!"

"I was the first one in. Everybody was crying."

"Well, you just listen! I tell you not to go there, and I mean it! You look
at me when I'm talking to you, young man."

Her irresistible fingers lifted  up his chip. Billy felt like he was living
in a Bible story.  He could almost hear Bucky Fay himself telling the tale:
And he  looked into her  eyes, and lo! when  her gaze fell upon  him he did
verily turn to stone, and he could not move though he sorely feared that he
might wet his pants, for her visage was wondrous ugly. Praise the Lord.

"Now you promise me  you won't go into that tent anymore, ever, because you
got no resistance at all, you just come straight home, you hear me?"

He could not move  until at last she despaired and looked away, and then he
found his voice and said, "What else am I supposed to do after school?"

Today was  different from all the other times  they had this argument: this
time his mother leaned on the counter and sobbed into the waffle mix. Billy
came and put his  arm around her and leaned his head on her hip. She turned
and held  him close  and said, "If  that son-of-a-bitch hadn't  left me you
might've had some brothers  and sisters to come home to." They made waffles
together,  and while  Billy pried  pieces of  overcooked waffle out  of the
waffle iron  with a bent table knife, he vowed that  he would not cause his
mother such distress again.  The revival tent could flap its wings and lift
up  its microwave dish  to take part  in the  largess of heaven,  but Billy
would  look the  other  way for  his mother's  sake,  for she  had suffered
enough.

Yet he  couldn't keep  his thoughts away  from the tent,  because when they
were  telling what  was coming  up soon  they had  said that Bucky  Fay was
coming. Bucky Fay, the healer of channel 49, who had been known to exorcise
that demon cancer and cast out kidney stones in the name of the Lord; Bucky
Fay, who looked to  Billy like the picture Mommy kept hidden in the back of
her top drawer, the picture of his father, the son-of-a-bitch. Billy wanted
to see the man with the healing hands, see him in the flesh.

"Mommy," he said. On TV the skinny people were praising Diet Pepsi.

"Mm?" Mommy didn't look up.

"I wish my foot was all twisted up so I couldn't walk."

Now she looked up. "My Lord, what for!"

"So Jesus could turn it around."

"Billy, that's disgusting."

"When the  miracle goes through you,  Mommy, it knocks you  on the head and
then you fall down  and get all better. A little girl with no arm got a new
arm from God. They said so."

"Child, they've turned you superstitious."

"I wish I had a club foot, so Jesus would do a miracle on me."

God moves  in mysterious ways, but  this time he was  pretty direct. Of all
the half-assed wishes that  got made and prayers that got said, Billy's got
answered. Billy's  mother was brooding about how the  boy was going off the
deep end. She decided  she had to get him out doing things that normal kids
do.  The movie  playing  at the  local family-oriented  moviehouse  was the
latest go-round  of Pollyanna.  They went and  watched and Billy  learned a
lesson. Billy  saw how good this  little girl was, and  how preachers liked
her, and  first thing you know  he was up on the  roof, figuring out how to
fall off just right so you smash your legs but don't break your back.

Never  did get it  right. Broke his  back, clean  as could be,  spinal cord
severed just below the shoulders, and there he was in a wheelchair, wearing
diapers and  pissing into a plastic  bag. In the hospital  he watched TV, a
religious station  that had God's chosen servants  on all day, praising and
praying and saving. And  they had Bucky Fay himself, praise the Lord, Bucky
Fay himself  making the deaf to  hear and the arthritic  to move around and
the audience to be  generous, and there sat Billy, more excited than he had
ever been before, because now he was ripe and ready for a miracle.

"Not a chance in  the world," his mother said. "By God I'm going to get you
uncrazy, and the last place I'm going to take you is anywhere in earshot of
those lying cheating hypocritical so-called healers."

But there's not many  people in the world can say no more than two or three
times to  a paralyzed kid in  a wheelchair, especially if  he's crying, and
besides, Mommy  thought, maybe  there's something to faith.  Lord knows the
boy's got that, even  if he doesn't have a single nerve in his legs. And if
there's even a chance  of maybe giving him back some of his body, what harm
can it do?

Once inside the tent, of course, she thought of other things. What if it is
a fraud,  which of course it  is, and what happens  when the boy finds out?
What  then? So  she whispered to  him, "Billy,  now don't go  expecting too
much."

"I'm not." Just a miracle, that's all. They do them all the time, Mommy.

"I just don't want you to be disappointed when nothing happens."

"I won't be disappointed, Mommy." No. He'll fix me right up.

And then the nice lady leaned over and asked, "You here to be healed?"

Billy only  nodded, recognizing her  as Bucky Fay's helper  lady who always
said "Oh, my sweet  Lord Jesus you're so kind" when people got healed, said
it in a  way that made your spine tingle. She was  wearing a lot of makeup.
Billy could  see she had a moustache with makeup  really packed onto it. He
wondered if  she was  really secretly a  man as she  wheeled him  up to the
front. But why would a man wear a dress? He was wondering about that as she
got him  in place, lined up  with the other wheelchair  people on the front
row.

A man came  along and knelt down in front of him.  Billy got ready to pray,
but the  man just talked normal, so Billy opened  his eyes. "Now this one's
going on  TV," the man said,  "and for the TV  show we need you  to be real
careful, son.  Don't say anything unless Bucky  asks you a direct question,
and then you  just tell him real quick. Like when he  asks you how come you
got in a wheelchair, what'll you tell him?"

"I'll say-- I'll say--"

"Now don't  go freezing up on  him, or it'll look real  bad. This is on TV,
remember. Now you just tell me how come you got in a wheelchair."

"So I could get healed by the power of Jesus."

The man looked at  him a moment, and then he said, "Sure. I guess you'll do
just fine. Now when  it's all over, and you're healed, I'll be right there,
holding you  by the arm. Now  don't say Thank the  Lord right off. You wait
till I squeeze your arm, and then you say it. Okay?"

"Okay."

"For the TV, you know."

"Yeah."

"Don't be nervous."

"I won't."

The man  went away but he  was back in just  a second looking worried. "You
can feel things in your arms, can't you?"

Billy lifted his arms  and waved them up and down. "My arms are just fine."
The man nodded and went away again.

There was  nothing to do but watch, then, and  Billy watched, but he didn't
see much. On  the TV, all you could see was Bucky  Fay, but here the camera
guys kept getting in front of him, and people were going back and forth all
during the praising time  and the support this ministry time so Billy could
hardly keep track of what was going on. Till the man who talked to him came
over  to him  again, and  this time a  younger guy  was with him,  and they
lifted Billy out of  his chair and carried him over toward where the lights
were so  bright, and the cameras were turned toward  him, and Bucky Fay was
saying,  "And  now who  is  first,  thanks be  to  the Lord?  Are you  that
righteous  young man  who the devil  has cursed  to be a  homophiliac? Come
here, boy! God's going  to give you a blood transfusion from the hemoglobin
of the Holy Spirit!"

Billy didn't  know what to do.  If he said anything  before Bucky Fay asked
him a  question, the man would  be mad, but what good  would it do if Bucky
Fay  ordered up  the wrong  miracle? But then  he saw  how the man  who had
talked  to  him  turned   his  face  away  from  the  camera  and  mouthed,
"Paralyzed,"  and Bucky  Fay caught it  and went  right on, saying  "Do you
think the Saviour is  worried? Paralyzed you are, too, completely helpless,
and yet when the miracle comes into your body, do you think the Holy Spirit
needs the doctor's diagnosis? No, praise the Lord, the Holy Spirit goes all
through you,  hunting down every place where the  devil has hurt you, where
the devil that great  serpent has poisoned you, where the devil that mighty
dragon has thought he could destroy you-- boy, are you saved?"

It was a direct question. "Uh huh."

"Has the  Lord come  to you in the  waters of baptism and  washed away your
sins and made you clean?"

Billy wasn't sure what  that all meant, but after a second the man squeezed
his arm, and so Billy said, "Thank the Lord."

"What the  baptism did to the outside of your body,  the miracle will do to
the inside of your body. Do you believe that Jesus can heal you?"

Billy nodded.

"Oh,  be  not ashamed,  little  child. Speak  so  all the  millions of  our
television friends can hear you. Can Jesus heal you?"

"Yes! I know he can!"

Bucky Fay  smiled, and  his face went  holy; he spat on  his hands, clapped
twice, and then slapped  Billy in the forehead, splashing spit all over his
face, just  that very second the  two men holding him  sort of half-dropped
him, and  as he clutched forward with his hands  he realized that all those
times when people seemed  to be overcome by the Holy Spirit, they were just
getting dropped,  but that was probably  part of the miracle.  They got him
down on the floor  and Bucky Fay went on talking about the Lord knowing the
pure in heart,  and then the two men picked him up  and this time stood him
on  his legs.  Billy couldn't  feel a thing,  but he  did know that  he was
standing. They  were helping him balance,  but his weight was  on his legs,
and  the miracle  had  worked. He  almost praised  God  right then,  but he
remembered in time, and waited.

"I bet you feel a little weak, don't you," said Bucky Fay.

Was that a direct question? Billy wasn't sure, so he just nodded his head.

"When the Holy Spirit went through the Apostle Paul, didn't he lie upon the
ground?  Already you are  able to stand  upon your  legs, and after  a good
night's sleep, when your body has strengthened itself after being inhabited
by the  Spirit of the Lord, you'll be restored to  your whole self, good as
new!"

Then the man squeezed  Billy's arm. "Praise the Lord," Billy said. But that
was wrong--  it was supposed to  be thank the Lord, and  so he said it even
louder, "Thank the Lord."

And now  with the cameras on  him, the two men  holding him worked the real
miracle, for  they turned him and leaned him  forward, and pulled him along
back to the wheelchair. As they pulled him, they rocked him back and forth,
and under him Billy  could hear his shoes scuffing the ground, left, right,
left, right, just as  if he was walking. But he wasn't walking. He couldn't
feel  a thing.  And then  he knew.  All those  miracles, all  those walkIng
people-- they  had men beside them, leaning  them left, leaning them right,
making their  legs fall forward,  just like dolls, just  like dummies, real
dummies. And  Billy cried. They got  the camera real close  to him then, to
show the tears streaking down his face. The crowd applauded and praised.

"He's new  at walking,"  Bucky Fay shouted  into the microphone.  "He isn't
used to so much exercise. Let that boy ride in his chair again until he has
a chance  to build up his  strength. But praise the  Lord! We know that the
miracle  is  done,  Jesus  has given  this  boy  his  legs  and healed  his
hemophobia,  too!" As  the  woman wheeled  him down  the aisle,  the people
reached out to touch  him, said kind and happy things to him, and he cried.
His mother was crying for joy. She embraced him and said, "You walked," and
Billy cried  harder. Out in the  car he told her  the truth. She looked off
toward the  brightly lit door of that  flamboyant, that seductive tent, and
she  said, "God damn  him to burn  in hell  forever." But Billy  was quite,
quite sure that God would do no such thing.

Not that  Billy doubted  God. No, God had  all power, God was  a granter of
prayers. God  was even fair-minded,  after his fashion. But  Billy knew now
that when God set himself to balance things in the world, he did it sneaky.
He did  it tricky.  He did it  ass-backward, so that anybody  who wanted to
could see his works  in the world and still doubt God. After all, what good
was faith if God  went around leaving plain evidence of his goodness in the
world? No,  not God.  His goodness would  be kept a  profound secret, Billy
knew that. Just a secret God kept to himself.

And sure enough, when God set out to even things up for Billy, he didn't do
the  obvious thing.  He  didn't let  the nerves  heal,  he didn't  send the
miracle of  feeling, the blessing of pain  into Billy's empty legs. Instead
God,  who probably  had  a bet  on with  Satan about  this one,  gave Billy
another gift entirely, an unlooked-for blessing that would break his heart.

Mother was wheeling Billy  around the park. It was a fine summer day, which
means that  the humidity was so  high that fish could  live for days out of
the water. Billy was dripping sweat, and he knew that when he got home he'd
have a hell of a diaper rash, and Mother would say, "Oh you poor dear," and
Billy would  grieve because it didn't even itch.  The river was flowing low
and there  were big rocks uncovered by the  shore. Billy sat there watching
the kids climb around on the rocks. His mother saw what he was watching and
tried to  take him away so he wouldn't get  depressed about how he couldn't
climb, but  Billy wouldn't let her.  He just stayed and  watched. He picked
out one kid in  particular, a pretty-faced body with a muscled chest, about
two  years  older than  Billy.  He  watched everything  that  boy did,  and
pretended that  he was doing it.  That was a good  thing to do, Billy would
rather do that than anything, watch this boy play for him on the rocks.

But all  the time there was this idiot girl watching  Billy. She was on the
grass, far  back from the shore,  where all the cripples  have to stay. She
walked like  an inchworm almost, each  step a major event,  as if she was a
big doll  with a little driver inside working  the controls, and the driver
wasn't very  good at  it yet. Billy tried  to watch the golden  body of the
pretty-faced boy,  but this spastic girl kept  lurching around at the edges
of his eyes.

"Make that retard go away," Billy whispered.

"What?" asked Mother.

"I don't want to look at that retard girl."

"Then don't look at her."

"Make her go away. She keeps looking at me."

Mother patted  Billy's shoulder.  "Other people got rights,  Billy. I can't
make her go away from the park. You want me to take you somewhere else?"

"No." Not  while the golden boy  was standing tall on  the rocks, extending
himself  to  snatch Frisbies  out  of  the air  without  falling. Like  God
catching lightning and laughing in delight.

The spastic  girl came  closer and closer,  in her sidewise  way. And Billy
grew more and more  determined not to pay the slightest heed to her. It was
obvious, though,  that she was coming to him, that  she meant to reach him,
and as  he sat there he  grew afraid. What would  she do? His greatest fear
was of someone snatching his urine bag from between his legs and holding it
up, the catheter tugging  away at him, and everybody laughing and laughing.
That was what he hated worst, living his life like a tire with a slow leak.
He knew  that she would grab  between his legs for  the urine bag under his
lap robe,  and probably spill it  all over, she was  such a spastic. But he
said nothing  of his fear, just waited, holding  onto his lap, watching the
golden boy  jump from the high rock into the river  in, order to splash the
kids were perched on the lesser rocks.

Then the spastic girl  touched him. Thumped her club of a hand into his arm
and moaned loudly. Billy  cried out, "Oh, God!" The girl shuddered and fell
to the ground, weeping.

All at  once every  single person in  the park ran over  and leaned around,
jostling and  looking. Billy held tight to his  lap robe, lest someone pull
it  away. The  spastic girl's  parents were  all apology, she'd  never done
anything like  that, she usually just  kept to herself, we're  so sorry, so
terribly sorry.  They lifted the girl to her feet,  tried to lead her away,
but she  shrugged them off  violently. She shuddered again,  and formed her
mouth elaborately  to make a  word. Her parents watched  her lips intently,
but when the words came, they were clear. "I am better," she said.

Carefully she  took a step, not  toward her parents, but  toward Billy. The
step was  not a lurch controlled by a clumsy  little puppeteer. It slow and
uncertain, but it was a human step. "He healed me," she said.

Step after  step, each more deft than the last,  and Billy forgot all about
his lap  robe. She was healed,  she was whole. She  had touched him and now
was cured.

"Praise God," someone in the crowd said.

"It's just like on TV," someone else said.

"Saw it with my own two eyes."

And the  girl fell to her  knees beside Billy and  kissed his hand and wept
and wept.

They started  coming after that, as word spread.  Just a shy-looking man at
the front  door, a pesky fat lady with a skinny  brother, a mother with two
mongoloid children. All the  freaks in Billy's town, all the sufferers, all
the desperate seemed to  find the way to his house. "No," Billy told Mother
again and again. "I don't want to see nobody."

"But it's a little baby," Mother said. "He's so sweet. He's been through so
much pain."

They came in, one  by one, and demanded or begged or praytd or just timidly
whispered to him, "Heal me." Then Billy would sit there, trembling, as they
reached out and touched him. When they knew that they were healed, and they
always  were, they  cried and  kissed and  praised and thanked  and offered
money.  Billy  always refused  the  money  and said  precious little  else.
"Aren't  you going to  give the glory  to God?"  asked one lady,  whose son
Billy healed  of leukemia. But Billy just looked at  his lap robe until she
went away.

The  first reporters  came  from the  grocery store  papers, the  ones that
always know  about the UFOs. They  kept asking him to  prophesy the future,
until Billy  told Mother not to  let them come in  anymore. Mother tried to
keep them out, but  they even pretended to be cripples in order to get past
the door.  They wrote stories about the  "crippled healer" and kept quoting
Billy as saying things that he never said. They also published his address.

Hundreds of people came  every day now, a constant stream all day. One lady
with a gimp leg said, "Praise the Lord, it was worth the hundred dollars."

"What hundred dollars?" asked Billy.

"The  hundred dollars  I give your  mother. I  give the doctors  a thousand
bucks and the government  give them ten thousand more and they never done a
damn thing for me."

Billy called  Mother. She came in. "This woman says  she gave you a hundred
dollars."

"I didn't ask for the money," Mother said.

"Give it back," Billy said.

Mother took the money  out of her apron and gave it back. The woman clucked
about how she didn't mind either way and left.

"I ain't no Bucky Fay," Billy said.

"Of  course you  ain't,"  Mother said.  "When  people touch  you, they  get
better."

"No money, from nobody."

"That's real smart," Mother said. "I lost my job last week, Billy. I'm home
all day just keeping them away from you. How are we going to live?"

Billy  just  sat there,  trying  to  think about  it.  "Don't  let them  in
anymore," he said. "Lock the doors and go to work."

Mother started  to cry. "Billy, I can't stand it if  you don't let them in.
All those  babies; all those  twisted-up people, all those  cancers and the
fear of death in their faces, I can't stand it except that somehow, by some
miracle, when they come  in your room and touch you, they come out whole. I
don't know  how to  turn them away.  Jesus gave you  a gift  I didn't think
existed in  the world,  but it didn't  belong to you, Billy.  It belongs to
them."

"I touch myself every day," Billy whispered, "and I never get better."

From then  on Mother  only took half  of whatever people  offered, and only
after they  were healed, so people  wouldn't get the idea  that the healing
depended on  the money. That way  she was able to  scrape up enough to keep
the  roof over  their  heads and  food on  the table.  "There's a  lot less
thankful money  than bribe  money in the  world," she said  to Billy. Billy
just  ate, being careful  not to spill  hot soup  on his lap,  because he'd
never know if he scalded himself.

Then one day the  TV cameras came, and the movie cameras, and set up on the
lawn and in, the street outside.

"What the hell are you doing?" demanded Billy's mother.

"Bucky Fay's  coming to meet the crippled healer,"  said the movie man. "We
want to have this for Bucky Fay's show."

"If  you try  to bring  one little  camera inside  our house I'll  have the
police on you."

"The public's  got a right to  know," said the man,  pointing the camera at
her.

"The public's  got a right to kiss my ass," said  Mother, and she went back
into the  house and told everybody to go away  and come back tomorrow, they
were locking up the house for the day.

Mother and Billy watched  through the lacy curtains while Bucky Fay got out
of his limousine and  waved at the cameras and the people crowded around in
the street.

"Don't let him in, Mother," said Billy.

Bucky Fay knocked on the door.

"Don't answer," said Billy.

Bucky Fay  knocked and knocked. Then he gestured  to the cameramen and they
all went  back to  their vans and all  of Bucky Fay's helpers  went back to
their cars  and the police held  the crowd far away,  and Bucky Fay started
talking.

"Billy," said Bucky Fay,  "I don't aim to hurt you. You're a true healer, I
just want to shake your hand."

"Don't let him touch me again," said Billy. Mother shook her head.

"If you  let me help you,  you can heal hundreds  and hundreds more people,
all around the world, and bring millions of TV viewers to Jesus."

"The boy don't want you," Mother said.

"Why are you afraid of me? I didn't give you your gift, God did."

"Go away!" Billy shouted.

There was  silence for  a moment outside  the door. Then  Bucky Fay's voice
came again, softer, and  it sounded like he was holding back a sob. "Billy,
why do you think I come to you? I am the worst son-of-a-bitch I know, and I
come for you to heal me."

That was not a thing that Billy had ever thought to hear from Bucky Fay.

Bucky Fay was talking soft now, so it was sometimes hard to understand him.
"In the name of  Jesus, boy, do you think I woke up one morning and said to
myself, 'Bucky  Fay, go out and  be a healer and  you'll get rich'? Think I
said that? No sir.  I had a gift once. Like yours, I had a gift. I found it
one day  when I was swimming  at the water hole  with my big brother Jeddy.
Jeddy, he was a show-off, he was always tempting Death to come for him, and
that day  he dove right down  from the highest branch  and plunked his head
smack in the softest,  stickiest mud on the bottom of Pachuckamunkey River.
Took fifteen minutes just  to get his head loose. They brought him to shore
and he  was dead, his face  all covered with mud.  And I screamed and cried
out loud, 'God, you ain't got no right!' and then I touched my brother, and
smacked  him on  the head,  I said,  'God damn  you, Jeddy,  you pin-headed
jackass, you ain't dead, get up and walk!' And that was when I discovered I
had the  gift. Because Jeddy reached up and wiped the  mud off his eyes and
rolled over and puked the black Pachukey water all over grass there. 'Thank
you Jesus,' I said. In those days I could lay hands on mules with bent legs
and they'd go straight.  A baby with measles, and his spots would go. I had
a  good heart then.  I healed colored  people, and  in those days  even the
doctors wouldn't  go so far as that. But then they  offered me money, and I
took  it, and  they asked  me to preach  even though  I didn't know  a damn
thing, and so I  preached, and pretty soon I found myself in a jet airplane
that I owned flying  over an airstrip that I owned heading for a TV station
that I owned and  I said to myself, Bucky Fay, you haven't healed a soul in
twenty years.  A few folks have  gotten better because of  their own faith,
but you  lost the gift.  You threw it away  for the sake of  money." On the
other side of the door Bucky Fay wailed in anguish. "Oh, God in heaven, let
me in this door or I will die!"

Billy nodded, tears in  his eyes, and Mother opened the door. Bucky Fay was
on his  knees leaning against the door so he nearly  fell into the room. He
didn't even  stand up to walk  over to Billy, just  crawled most of the way
and then  said, "Billy,  the light of  God is in  your eyes. Heal  me of my
affliction! My disease is  love of money! My disease is forgetting the Lord
God of heaven! Heal me and let me have my gift back again, and I will never
stray, not ever so long as I live!"

Billy reached out his  hand. Slow and trembling, Bucky Fay gently took that
hand and kissed it,  and touched it to the tears hot and wet on his cheeks.
"You have  given me," he  said, "you have given  me this day a  gift that I
never thought  to have again. I am whole!" He got  up, kissed Billy on both
cheeks, then stepped back.  "Oh, my child, I will pray for you. With all my
heart I will pray that God will remove your paralysis from your legs. For I
believe he gave you your paralysis to teach you compassion for the cripple,
just as  he gave me temptation  to teach me compassion  for the sinner. God
bless you, Billy, Hallelujah!"

"Hallelujah," said  Billy softly. He was crying  too-- couldn't help it, he
felt so good. He had longed for vengeance, and instead he had forgiven, and
he felt holy.

That is,  until he  realized that the  TV cameras had come  in right behind
Bucky  Fay, and  were taking  a close-up  of Billy's tear-stained  face, of
Mother wringing  her hands and weeping. Bucky Fay  walked out the door, his
clenched fist high above his head, and the crowd outside greeted him with a
cheer. "Hallelujah!" shouted Bucky. "Jesus has made me whole!"

It played real well  on the religious station. Bucky Fay's repentance-- oh,
how the  crowds in  the studio audience  gasped at his  confession. How the
people wept  at the moment when  Billy reached out his  hand. It was a fine
show.  And at  the  end, Bucky  Fay wept  again. "Oh,  my friends  who have
trusted me, you have seen the mighty change in my heart. From now on I will
wear the  one suit that you see me wearing now.  I have forsaken my diamond
cuff links and my Lear jet and my golf course in Louisiana. I am so ashamed
of what  I was before God healed me with the  hands of that little crippled
boy. I tell all of you-- send me no more money! Don't send me a single dime
to post office box  eight three nine, Christian City, Louisiana 70539. I am
not  fit  to have  your  money.  Contribute your  tithes  and offerings  to
worthier men than I. Send me nothing!--"

Then he  knelt and bowed his  head for a moment,  and then looked up again,
out  into the  audience,  into the  cameras, tears  flowing down  his face.
"Unless. Unless  you forgive me. Unless you  believe that Jesus has changed
me before your very eyes."

Mother switched off the TV savagely.

"After  seeing all  those  other people  get better,"  Billy  whispered, "I
thought he might've gotten better, too."

Mother shook her head  and looked away. "What he got isn't a disease." Then
she bent over the wheelchair and hugged him. "I feel so bad, Billy!"

"I don't feel bad,"  Billy said. "Jesus cured the blind people and the deaf
people and  the crippled people and  the lepers. But as  far as I remember,
the Bible don't say he ever cured even one son-ofa-bitch."

She  was  still hugging  him,  which he  didn't  mind even  though he  near
smothered  in her  bosom. Now  she chuckled.  It was  all right,  if Mother
chuckled  about it.  "Guess you're  right about  that," Mother  said. "Even
Jesus did no better."

For a while they  had a rest, because the people who believed went to Bucky
Fay and the doubters figured that Billy was no better. The newspaper and TV
people stopped  coming around, too, because  Billy never put on  a show for
them and  never said  anything that people  would pay money  to read. Then,
after a  while, the sick people  started coming back, just  a few a week at
first, and then more  and more. They were uncertain, skeptical. They hadn't
heard of Billy on  TV lately, hadn't read about him either, and he lived in
such a  poor neighborhood, with no signs or anything.  More than once a car
with out-of-state plates drove  back and forth in front of the house before
it stopped  and someone came in. The ones who came  were those who had lost
all  other  hope, who  were  willing  to try  anything,  even something  as
unlikely as  this. They had heard a rumor, someone  had a cousin whose best
friend  was healed.  They always  felt like  such damn fools  visiting this
crippled kid, but it was better than sitting home waiting for death.

So they came, more  and more of them. Mother had to quit her job again. All
day Billy waited in  his bedroom for them to come in. They always looked so
distant, guarding  themselves against another  disillusionment. Billy, too,
was afraid, waiting for the day when someone would place a baby in his arms
and the  child would die, the healing power gone out  of him. But it didn't
happen, day after day  it didn't happen, and the people kept coming fearful
and departing in joy.

Mother and Billy lived  pretty poorly, since they only took money that came
from gratitude instead of  money meant to buy. But Billy had a decent life,
if you  don't mind being paralyzed and stuck home  all the time, and Mother
didn't mind too much  either, since there was always the sight of the blind
seeing and  the crippled walking and  those withered-up children coming out
whole and strong.

Then one  day after quite a  few years there came  a young woman who wasn't
sick. She was healthy and tall and nice-looking, in a kitcheny kind of way.
She had  rolled-up sleeves and hands that  looked like they'd met dishwater
before,  and she  walked right  into the  house and  said, "Make  room, I'm
moving in."

"Now, girl, " said Mother, "we got a small house and no room to put you up.
I think  you got the wrong idea of what kind  of Christian charity we offer
here."

"Yes, Ma'am.  I know  just what you  do. Because I  am the  little girl who
touched Billy that day by the riverside and started all your misery."

"Now, girl, you know that didn't start our misery."

"I've never  forgotten. I grew up and went through  two husbands and had no
children and no memory  of real love except for what I saw in the face of a
crippled  boy at the  riverside, and I  thought, 'He  needs me, and  I need
him.' So here I am, I'm here to help, tell me what to do and step aside."

Her name  was Madeleine and she  stayed from then on.  She wasn't noisy and
she wasn't  bossy, she just worked her share and got  along. It was hard to
know for  sure why it was so, but with Madeleine  there, even with no money
and no  legs, Billy's life was  good. They sang a  lot of songs, Mother and
Billy  and Madeleine,  sang  and played  games and  talked  about a  lot of
things, when the visitors  gave them time. And only once in all those years
did Madeleine  ever talk  to Billy about  religion. And then it  was just a
question.

"Billy," asked Madeleine, "are you God?"

Billy shook his head. "God ain't no cripple."

Eye for Eye

*Just talk, Mick. Tell us everything. We'll listen.*

Well to start with  I know I was doing terrible things. If you're a halfway
decent person,  you don't go looking to kill people. Even  if you can do it
without touching them. Even if you can do it so as nobody even guesses they
was murdered, you still got to try not to do it.

*Who taught you that?*

Nobody. I  mean it wasn't in the books in  the Baptist Sunday School-- they
spent all  their time telling us  not to lie or  break the sabbath or drink
liquor. Never  did mention killing. Near as I  can figure, the Lord thought
killing  was  pretty smart  sometimes,  like  when Samson  done  it with  a
donkey's  jaw. A  thousand  guys dead,  but that  was  okay cause  they was
Philistines. And lighting foxes'  tails on fire. Samson was a sicko, but he
still got his pages in the Bible.

I figure  Jesus was about the only guy got much  space in the Bible telling
people not  to kill. And even  then, there's that story  about how the Lord
struck down  a guy and his wife cause they held  back on their offerings to
the Christian church. Oh,  Lord, the TV preachers did go on about that. No,
it wasn't cause I got religion that I figured out not to kill people.

You know  what I think it  was? I think it was  Vondel Cone's elbow. At the
Baptist Children's  Home in Eden, North  Carolina, we played basketball all
the time.  On a bumpy dirt  court, but we figured it  was part of the game,
never knowing which way  the ball would bounce. Those boys in the NBA, they
play a sissy game on that flat smooth floor.

We played basketball because there wasn't a lot else to do. Only thing they
ever had on TV was the preachers. We got it all cabled in-- Falwell from up
in  Lynchburg, Jim and  Tammy from  Charlotte, Jimmy Swaggart  looking hot,
Ernest Ainglee looking carpeted,  Billy Graham looking like God's executive
vice-president-- that was all  our TV ever showed, so no wonder we lived on
the basketball court all year.

Anyway,  Vondel Cone  wasn't particularly  tall and he  wasn't particularly
good  at  shooting  and  on the  court  nobody  was  even  halfway good  at
dribbling.  But he  had elbows.  Other guys,  when they  hit you it  was an
accident. But when Vondel's  elbow met up with your face, he like to pushed
your nose out  your ear. You can bet we all learned  real quick to give him
room. He got to take all the shots and get all the rebounds he wanted.

But we got even.  We just didn't count his points. We'd call out the score,
and any basket he  made it was like it never happened. He'd scream and he'd
argue and  we'd all stand there  and nod and agree  so he wouldn't punch us
out,  and then  as soon  as the  next basket  was made,  we'd call  out the
score--  still  not counting  Vondel's  points.  Drove that  boy crazy.  He
screamed till  his eyes  bugged out, but  nobody ever counted  his cheating
points.

Vondel died  of leukemia at the age of fourteen. You  see, I never did like
that boy.

But I learned something  from him. I learned how unfair it was for somebody
to get  his way just because he didn't care how  much he hurt other people.
And when  I finally realized that I was just  about the most hurtful person
in the  whole world,  I knew then  and there that  it just  wasn't right. I
mean, even  in the Old Testament, Moses said  the punishment should fit the
crime. Eye  for eye,  tooth for tooth.  Even Steven, that's  what Old Peleg
said before I killed  him of prostate cancer. It was when Peleg got took to
the hospital  that I left the Eden Baptist  Children's Home. Cause I wasn't
Vondel. I did care how much I hurt folks.

But that  doesn't have nothing to  do with anything. I  don't know what all
you want me to talk about.

*Just talk, Mick. Tell us whatever you want.*

Well I  don't aim to tell  you my whole life story.  I mean I didn't really
start to  figure out anything till  I got on that bus  in Roanoke, and so I
can pretty  much start there I  guess. I remember being  careful not to get
annoyed when  the lady in front of me didn't have  the right change for the
bus. And I didn't get angry when the bus driver got all snotty and told the
lady to  get off.  It just wasn't  worth killing for. That's  what I always
tell myself  when I  get mad. It isn't  worth killing for, and  it helps me
calm myself  down. So  anyway I reached  past her and pushed  a dollar bill
through the slot.

"This is for both of us," I says.

"I don't make change," says he.

I could've  just said "Fine" and  left it at that, but  he was being such a
prick that I had  to do something to make him see how ignorant he was. So I
put  another nickel  in  the slot  and  said, "That's  thirty-five for  me,
thirty-five for  her, and thirty-five for  the next guy gets  on without no
change."

So maybe I provoked  him. I'm sorry for that, but I'm human, too, I figure.
Anyway he was  mad. "Don't you smart off with me, boy.  I don't have to let
you ride, fare or no fare."

Well, fact was  he did, that's the law, and anyway I  was white and my hair
was short so his  boss would probably do something if I complained. I could
have told him what for and shut his mouth up tight. Except that if I did, I
would have  gotten too  mad, and no  man deserves to  die just  for being a
prick. So  I looked down at the floor and said,  "Sorry, sir." I didn't say
"Sorry sir" or anything snotty like that. I said it all quiet and sincere.

If he  just dropped  it, everything would  have been fine, you  know? I was
mad, yes,  but I'd gotten okay  at bottling it in,  just kind of holding it
tight and  then waiting for it to ooze away  where it wouldn't hurt nobody.
But  just as  I turned  to head  back toward  a seat,  he lurched  that bus
forward so hard that it flung me down and I only caught myself from hitting
the floor by catching the handhold on a seatback and half-smashing the poor
lady sitting there.

Some other people said, "Hey!" kind of mad, and I realize now that they was
saying  it to  the driver, cause  they was on  my side.  But at the  time I
thought they  was mad at me, and that plus the  scare of nearly falling and
how mad I already was, well, I lost control of myself. I could just feel it
in me, like sparklers  in my blood veins, spinning around my whole body and
then  throwing off this  pulse that went  and hit  that bus driver.  He was
behind  me,  so I  didn't  see  it with  my  eyes.  But I  could feel  that
sparkiness  connect up  with  him, and  twist him  around inside,  and then
finally it  came loose from me,  I didn't feel it no  more. I wasn't mad no
more. But I knew I'd done him already.

I even  knew where. It was  in his liver. I was a  real expert on cancer by
now. Hadn't  I seen  everybody I ever knew  die of it? Hadn't  I read every
book in  the Eden Public Library  on cancer? You can  live without kidneys,
you can  cut out a lung,  you can take out  a colon and live  with a bag in
your pants, but you can't live without a liver and they can't transplant it
either. That  man was dead. Two  years at the most,  I gave him. Two years,
all  because  he was  in  a bad  mood  and lurched  his  bus to  trip up  a
smart-mouth kid.

I  felt like  piss on  a flat  rock. On  that day  I had gone  nearly eight
months,  since before  Christmas,  the whole  year so  far  without hurting
anybody. It  was the  best I'd ever  done, and I  thought I'd  licked it. I
stepped across the lady  I smashed into and sat by the window, looking out,
not seeing  anything. All I could think was I'm  sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.
Did  he have  a wife  and kids? Well,  they'd be  a widow and  orphans soon
enough,  because  of  me.  I could  feel  him  from  clear  over here.  The
sparkiness of his belly,  making the cancer grow and keeping his body's own
natural fire  from burning  it out. I wanted  with all my heart  to take it
back, but  I couldn't. And like  so many times before,  I thought to myself
that if I had any guts I'd kill myself. I couldn't figure why I hadn't died
of my  own cancer  already. I sure enough  hated myself a lot  worse than I
ever hated anybody else.

The  lady beside  me starts  to talk.  "People like  that are  so annoying,
aren't they?"

I didn't want to talk to anybody, so I just grunted and turned away.

"That was very kind of you to help me," she says.

That's  when I realized  she was the  same lady  who didn't have  the right
fare. "Nothing," I says.

"No, you didn't have to do that." She touched my jeans.

I turned  to look at her.  She was older, about  twenty-five maybe, and her
face looked kind of sweet. She was dressed nice enough that I could tell it
wasn't cause  she was poor that  she didn't have bus  fare. She also didn't
take her  hand off my knee, which made me nervous,  because the bad thing I
do is  a lot stronger when I'm actually touching a  person, and so I mostly
don't touch  folks and I don't feel safe when they  touch me. The fastest I
ever killed  a man was when  he felt me up in a bathroom  at a rest stop on
I-85. He  was coughing blood when  I left that place,  I really tore him up
that time, I still  have nightmares about him gasping for breath there with
his hand on me.

So anyway that's why  I felt real nervous her touching me there on the bus,
even  though there  was no  harm in  it. Or  anyway that's  half why  I was
nervous, and the other  half was that her hand was real light on my leg and
out  of the  corner of  my eye  I could  see how  her chest moved  when she
breathed, and  after all I'm seventeen  and normal in most  ways. So when I
wished she'd  move her hand, I  only half wished she'd  move it back to her
own lap.

That was up till she smiles at me and says, "Mick, I want to help you."

It took me a second to realize she spoke my name. I didn't know many people
in  Roanoke, and  she sure  wasn't one of  them. Maybe  she was one  of Mr.
Kaiser's customers, I thought. But they hardly ever knew my name. I kind of
thought for  a second, that maybe she had seen  me working in the warehouse
and asked Mr. Kaiser  all about me or something. So I says, "Are you one of
Mr. Kaiser's customers?"

"Mick Winger,"  she says.  "You got your  first name from a  note pinned to
your blanket  when you were left  at the door of  the sewage plant in Eden.
You chose your last name when you ran away from the Eden Baptist Children's
Home, and you probably chose it because the first movie you ever saw was An
Officer and  a Gentleman. You were fifteen  then, and now you're seventeen,
and you've killed more people in your life than Al Capone."

I got nervous when  she knew my whole name and how I got it, cause the only
way she could know that stuff was if she'd been following me for years. But
when she let on she knew I killed people, I forgot all about feeling mad or
guilty or horny. I pulled the cord on the bus, practically crawled over her
to  get out,  and in about  three seconds I  was off  that bus and  hit the
ground running. I'd been afraid of it for years, somebody finding out about
me. But it  was all the more scary seeing how she  must have known about me
for so  long. It made me feel like somebody'd  been peeking in the bathroom
window all my life and I only just now found out about it.

I  ran for  a  long time,  which isn't  easy  because of  all the  hills in
Roanoke. I ran mostly downhill, though, into town, where I could dodge into
buildings and out their  back doors. I didn't know if she was following me,
but she'd  been following me for  a long time, or  someone had, and I never
even guessed it, so how did I know if they was following me now or not?

And while  I ran, I tried  to figure where I  could go now. I  had to leave
town, that  was sure. I couldn't go back to the  warehouse, not even to say
good-bye, and  that made me feel  real bad, cause Mr.  Kaiser would think I
just ran  off for  no reason, like  some kid who didn't  care nothing about
people counting on him.  He might even worry about me, never coming to pick
up my spare clothes from the room he let me sleep in.

Thinking  about what  Mr.  Kaiser might  think  about me  going was  pretty
strange. Leaving Roanoke wasn't going to be like leaving the orphanage, and
then leaving Eden, and  finally leaving North Carolina. I never had much to
let go  of in  those places. But  Mr. Kaiser had always  been real straight
with me,  a nice  steady old guy, never  bossed me, never tried  to take me
down, even  stuck up for me  in a quiet kind of way  by letting it be known
that he didn't want nobody teasing me. Hired me a year and a half ago, even
though I was lying  about being sixteen and he must've known it. And in all
that time, I never  once got mad at work, or at least not so mad I couldn't
stop myself  from hurting people. I  worked hard, built up  muscles I never
thought  I'd have,  and I  also must've  grown five  inches, my  pants kept
getting so short. I  sweated and I ached most days after work, but I earned
my pay and  kept up with the older guys, and Mr.  Kaiser never once made me
feel like  he took me on  for charity, the way  the orphanage people always
did, like I should thank them for not letting me starve. Kaiser's Furniture
Warehouse was  the first peaceful place I ever  spent time, the first place
where nobody died who was my fault.

I knew  all that before, but right till I  started running I never realized
how bad I'd feel  about leaving Roanoke. Like somebody dying. It got so bad
that for  a while I couldn't  hardly see which way I  was going, not that I
out-and-out cried or nothing.

Pretty soon  I found  myself walking down  Jefferson Street, where  it cuts
through a woody hill before it widens out for car dealers and Burger Kings.
There was cars passing  me both ways, but I was thinking about other things
now.  Trying to  figure why  I never  got mad  at Mr. Kaiser.  Other people
treated me nice before,  it wasn't like I got beat up every night or nobody
ever gave  me seconds or I had to eat dogfood  or nothing. I remembered all
those  people at the  orphanage, they was  just trying  to make me  grow up
Christian and educated. They just never learned how to be nice without also
being nasty.  Like Old Peleg, the  black caretaker, he was  a nice old coot
and told us stories, and I never let nobody call him nigger even behind his
back. But he was  a racist himself, and I knew it on account of the time he
caught me  and Jody Capel practicing who could  stop pissing the most times
in a single go. We both done the same thing, didn't we? But he just sent me
off  and then started  whaling on Jody,  and Jody  was yelling like  he was
dying,  and I  kept  saying, "It  ain't fair!  I done  it too!  You're only
beating on him  cause he's black!" but he paid no mind,  it was so crazy, I
mean it wasn't like  I wanted him to beat me too, but it made me so mad and
before I  knew it, I felt  so sparky that I  couldn't hold it in  and I was
hanging on him, trying to pull him away from Jody, so it hit him hard.

What could I say to him then? Going into the hospital, where he'd lie there
with a tube in his arm and a tube in his nose sometimes. He told me stories
when he  could talk, and just  squoze my hand when  he couldn't. He used to
have a belly on  him, but I think I could have tossed him in the air like a
baby before he died.  And I did it to him, not that  I meant to, I couldn't
help myself, but that's  the way it was. Even people I purely loved, they'd
have mean days, and  God help them if I happened to be there, because I was
like God with  a bad mood, that's what I was, God  with no mercy, because I
couldn't give them nothing, but I sure as hell could take away. Take it all
away. They told me I shouldn't visit Old Peleg so much cause it was sick to
keep going  to watch  him waste away.  Mrs. Howard and Mr.  Dennis both got
tumors from  trying to  get me to stop  going. So many people  was dying of
cancer in  those days  they came from  the county and tested  the water for
chemicals. It wasn't no  chemicals, I knew that, but I never did tell them,
cause they'd just lock  me up in the crazy house and you can bet that crazy
house  would have  a  epidemic before  I been  there  a week  if  that ever
happened.

Truth was  I didn't  know, I just  didn't know it  was me doing  it for the
longest time.  It's just people kept  dying on me, everybody  I ever loved,
and it  seemed like they always  took sick after I'd  been real mad at them
once,  and you  know how little  kids always  feel guilty about  yelling at
somebody  who dies  right  after. The  counselor  even told  me that  those
feelings were  perfectly natural, and of  course it wasn't my  fault, but I
couldn't shake it. And  finally I began to realize that other people didn't
feel that  sparky feeling like I did, and they  couldn't tell how folks was
feeling unless  they looked or asked. I mean, I  knew when my lady teachers
was going to be  on the rag before they did, and you  can bet I stayed away
from them the best I could on those crabby days. I could feel it, like they
was giving  off sparks. And there was other folks who  had a way of sucking
you to  them, without saying a thing, without doing  a thing, you just went
into a room and  couldn't take your eyes off them, you wanted to be close--
I saw that other kids felt the same way, just automatically liked them, you
know? But  I could feel it  like they was on fire,  and suddenly I was cold
and needed to warm  myself. And I'd say something about it and people would
look at me  like I was crazy enough to lock right  up, and I finally caught
on that I was the only one that had those feelings.

Once I  knew that, then all  those deaths began to  fit together. All those
cancers, those  days they lay in hospital  beds turning into mummies before
they was rightly dead, all the pain until they drugged them into zombies so
they wouldn't tear their  own guts out just trying to get to the place that
hurt so  bad. Torn up, cut up, drugged  up, radiated, bald, skinny, praying
for death,  and I  knew I did  it. I began to  tell the minute I  did it. I
began to know what  kind of cancer it would be, and where, and how bad. And
I  was always  right. Twenty-five  people I  knew of,  and probably  more I
didn't.

And it got even worse when I ran away. I'd hitch rides because how else was
I going to get  anywheres? But I was always scared of the people who picked
me up, and  if they got weird or anything I sparked  them. And cops who run
me out of  a place, they got it. Until I figured  I was just Death himself,
with his bent-up spear and a hood over his head, walking around and whoever
came near  hun bought the farm. That was me. I  was the most terrible thing
in  the world,  I was  families broke  up and  children orphaned  and mamas
crying for their dead babies, I was everything that people hate most in all
the world. I jumped  off a overpass once to kill myself but I just sprained
my ankle.  Old Peleg  always said I was  like a cat, I  wouldn't die lessen
somebody skinned  me, roasted  the meat and  ate it, then  tanned the hide,
made it  into slippers, wore them slippers clean  out, and then burned them
and raked the ashes,  that's when I'd finally die. And I figure he's right,
cause I'm  still alive  and that's a  plain miracle after the  stuff I been
through lately.

Anyway that's  the kind of  thing I was thinking,  walking along Jefferson,
when I noticed that  a car had driven by going the other way and saw me and
turned around and came back up behind me, pulled ahead of me and stopped. I
was so  spooked I thought it  must be that lady  finding me again, or maybe
somebody with guns  to shoot me all up like on "Miami  Vice," and I was all
set to take off up the hill till I saw it was just Mr. Kaiser.

He says, "I was heading the other way, Mick. Want a ride to work?"

I couldn't tell him what I was doing. "Not today, Mr. Kaiser," I says.

Well, he knew by  my look or something, cause he says, "You quitting on me,
Mick?"

I was  just thinking, don't argue with me or  nothing, Mr. Kaiser, just let
me go,  I don't  want to hurt  you, I'm so  fired up with  guilt and hating
myself that  I'm just death waiting  to bust out and  blast somebody, can't
you see sparks  falling off me like spray off a wet  dog? I just says, "Mr.
Kaiser, I don't want to talk right now, I really don't."

Right then was the  moment for him to push. For him to lecture me about how
I  had to  learn responsibility, and  if I  didn't talk things  through how
could  anybody  ever make  things  right, and  life  ain't a  free ride  so
sometimes you  got to do things  you don't want to do,  and I been nicer to
you than  you deserve, you're just what they  warned me you'd be, shiftless
and ungrateful and a bum in your soul.

But he didn't say none of that. He just says, "You had some bad luck? I can
advance you against wages, I know you'll pay back."

"I don't owe no money," I says.

And  he says,  "Whatever you're running  away from,  come home with  me and
you'll be safe."

What could I say?  You're the one who needs protecting, Mr. Kaiser, and I'm
the one who'll probably kill you. So I didn't say nothing, until finally he
just nodded  and put his hand on my shoulder  and said, "That's okay, Mick.
If you ever need  a place or a job, you just come on back to me. You find a
place to  settle down for a  while, you write to me  and I'll send you your
stuff."

"You just give it to the next guy," I says.

"A son-of-a-bitch  stinking mean old Jew  like me?" he says.  "I don't give
nothing to nobody."

Well I couldn't help but laugh, cause that's what the foreman always called
Mr. Kaiser  whenever he thought the  old guy couldn't hear  him. And when I
laughed, I  felt myself cool  off, just like as  if I had been  on fire and
somebody poured cold water over my head.

"Take care  of yourself, Mick," he  says. He give me  his card and a twenty
and tucked it into  my pocket when I told him no. Then he got back into his
car and made one of his insane U-turns right across traffic and headed back
the other way.

Well  if he  did nothing else  he got my  brain back  in gear. There  I was
walking along the highway  where anybody at all could see me, just like Mr.
Kaiser did. At least till I was out of town I ought to stay out of sight as
much as I could.  So there I was between those two hills, pretty steep, and
all covered  with green,  and I figured  I could climb either  one. But the
slope on the other  side of the road looked somehow better to me, it looked
more like I just ought to go there, and I figured that was as good a reason
to decide as  any I ever heard of, and so I  dodged my way across Jefferson
Street and  went right into the kudzu caves and clawed  my way right up. It
was dark under the  leaves, but it wasn't much cooler than right out in the
sun, particularly  cause I was working  so hard. It was  a long way up, and
just when I got  to the top the ground started shaking. I thought it was an
earthquake I was so edgy, till I heard the train whistle and then I knew it
was one  of those  coal-hauling trains, so  heavy it could shake  ivy off a
wall  when it  passed. I  just stood  there and  listened to it,  the sound
coming from every direction  all at once, there under the kudzu, I listened
till it went on by, and then I stepped out of the leaves into a clearing.

And there she was, waiting for me, sitting under a tree.

I was too wore  out to run, and too scared, coming on her sudden like that,
just when I thought  I was out of sight. It was just  as if I'd been aiming
straight at  her, all the  way up the hill,  just as if she  somehow tied a
string to  me and pulled me  across the street and up  the hill. And if she
could do that,  how could I run away from her, tell  me that? Where could I
go? I'd  just turn  some corner and there  she'd be, waiting. So  I says to
her, "All right, what do you want?"

She just  waved me on  over. And I went,  too, but not very  close, cause I
didn't know  what she had in mind. "Sit down, Mick,"  says she. "We need to
talk."

Now I'll tell you  that I didn't want to sit, and I  didn't want to talk, I
just wanted to get out of there. And so I did, or at least I thought I did.
I started  walking straight away from her, I thought,  but in three steps I
realized that  I wasn't walking away,  I was walking around  her. Like that
planet thing in science class, the more I moved, the more I got nowhere. It
was like she had more say over what my legs did than me.

So I sat down.

"You shouldn't have run off from me," she says.

What  I mostly thought  of now was  to wonder  if she was  wearing anything
under that  shirt. And  then I thought,  what a stupid time  to be thinking
about that. But I still kept thinking about it.

"Do you promise to stay right there till I'm through talking?" she says.

When  she moved,  it  was like  her clothes  got  almost transparent  for a
second, but not quite. Couldn't take my eyes off her. I promised.

And then all of  a sudden she was just a woman. Not  ugly, but not all that
pretty,  neither, just  looking at  me with  eyes like  fire. I  was scared
again, and  I wanted  to leave, especially  cause now I began  to think she
really was doing something to me. But I promised, so I stayed.

"That's how it began," she says.

"What's how what began?" says I.

"What you  just felt. What I made you feel. That  only works on people like
you. Nobody else can feel it."

"Feel what?" says I. Now, I knew what she meant, but I didn't know for sure
if she  meant what I knew.  I mean, it bothered me  real bad that she could
tell how I felt about her those few minutes there.

"Feel that," she says,  and there it is again, all I can think about is her
body. But it  only lasted a few seconds, and then I  knew for sure that she
was doing it to me.

"Stop it," I says, and she says, "I already did." I ask her, "How do you do
that?"

"Everybody  can  do it,  just  a  little. A  woman  looks at  a man,  she's
interested, and so the  bioelectrical system heats up, causes some odors to
change, and he smells them and notices her and he pays attention."

"Does it work the other way?"

"Men are always giving off those odors, Mick. Makes no difference. It isn't
a man's  stink that gives a woman her ideas. But  like I said, Mick, that's
what everybody can do. With some men, though, it isn't a woman's smell that
draws his eye. It's the bio-electrical system itself. The smell is nothing.
You can  feel the heat  of the fire. It's  the same thing as  when you kill
people, Mick. If you couldn't kill people the way you do, you also couldn't
feel it so strong when I give off magnetic pulses."

Of  course I  didn't  understand all  that the  first  time, and  maybe I'm
remembering it now with words she didn't teach me until later. At the time,
though,  I was  scared, yes,  because she  knew, and  because she  could do
things to me, but I was also excited, because she sounded like she had some
answers, like she knew why it was that I killed people without meaning to.

But when I asked  her to explain everything, she couldn't. "We're only just
beginning to understand it ourselves, Mick. There's a Swedish scientist who
is making  some strides that way. We've sent some  people over to meet with
him. We've read his book, and maybe even some of us understand it. I've got
to  tell you, Mick,  just because we  can do  this thing doesn't  mean that
we're particularly smart or anything. It doesn't get us through college any
faster or  anything. It just means  that teachers who flunk  us tend to die
off a little younger."

"You're like me! You can do it too!"

She  shook her  head. "Not  likely," she  says. "If  I'm really  furious at
somebody, if  I really hate him,  if I really try, and if  I keep it up for
weeks, I  can maybe give him  an ulcer. You're in  a whole different league
from me. You and your people."

"I got no people," I says.

"I'm here, Mick, because  you got people. People who knew just exactly what
you could  do from  the minute you were  born. People who knew  that if you
didn't get  a tit to suck  you wouldn't just cry,  you'd kill. Spraying out
death from your cradle.  So they planned it all from the beginning. Put you
in an orphanage. Let  other people, all those do-gooders, let them get sick
and die, and then when you're old enough to have control over it, then they
look you  up, they tell you  who you are, they bring  you home to live with
them."

"So you're my kin?" I ask her.

"Not  so you'd notice,"  she says. "I'm  here to  warn you about  your kin.
We've been watching you for years, and now it's time to warn you."

"Now  it's time?  I  spent fifteen  years in  that children's  home killing
everybody who ever cared  about me, and if they'd just come along-- or you,
or  anybody, if  you just  said, Mick,  you got  to control your  temper or
you'll hurt  people, if somebody just  said to me, Mick,  we're your people
and we'll  keep you safe, then maybe I wouldn't be  so scared all the time,
maybe I wouldn't go killing people so much, did you ever think of that?" Or
maybe I didn't say all that, but that's what I was feeling, and so I said a
lot, I chewed her up and down.

And then I saw how scared she was, because I was all sparky, and I realized
I was just about  to shed a load of death onto her, and so I kind of jumped
back and  yelled at her to  leave me alone, and  then she does the craziest
thing, she  reaches out  toward me, and  I scream at her,  "Don't you touch
me!" cause if she  touches me I can't hold it in, it'll just go all through
her  and tear  up her  guts inside,  but she  just keeps  reaching, leaning
toward me,  and so I  kind of crawled over  toward a tree, and  I hung onto
that  tree,  I just  held  on and  let  the tree  kind  of soak  up all  my
sparkiness, almost  like I was burning up the tree.  Maybe I killed it, for
all I know. Or maybe it was so big, I couldn't hurt it, but it took all the
fire out of me, and then she did touch me, like nobody ever touched me, her
arm across my back, and hand holding my shoulder, her face right up against
my ear, and she says to me, "Mick, you didn't hurt me."

"Just leave me alone," says I.

"You're  not like  them,"  she says.  "Don't you  see  that? They  love the
killing. They use the killing. Only they're not as strong as you. They have
to be  touching, for  one thing, or  close to it.  They have to  keep it up
longer. They're  stronger than I am,  but not as strong  as you. So they'll
want you, that's for sure, Mick, but they'll also be scared of you, and you
know what'll scare them most? That you didn't kill me, that you can control
it like that."

"I can't always. That bus driver today."

"So you're not perfect. But you're trying. Trying not to kill people. Don't
you see, Mick? You're not like them. They may be your blood family, but you
don't belong with them, and they'll see that, and when they do--"

All I  could think about was  what she said, my  blood family. "My mama and
daddy, you telling me I'm going to meet them?"

"They're calling you now, and that's why I had to warn you."

"Calling me?"

"The way I  called you up this hill. Only it wasn't  just me, of course, it
was a bunch of us."

"I just decided to come up here, to get off the road."

"You just decided to  cross the highway and climb this hill, instead of the
other one? Anyway, that's how it works. It's part of the human race for all
time,  only we never  knew it. A  bunch of  people kind of  harmonize their
bio-electrical systems,  to call for  somebody to come home,  and they come
home, after  a while. Or sometimes a whole  nation unites to hate somebody.
Like Iran and the Shah, or the Philippines and Marcos."

"They just kicked them out," I says.

"But  they  were  already  dying,  weren't  they? A  whole  nation,  hating
together,   they  make   a   constant  interference   with  their   enemy's
bio-electrical system. A constant  noise. All of them together, millions of
people, they  are finally able to  match what you can  do with one flash of
anger."

I thought  about that for a  few minutes, and it came  back to me-- all the
times I  thought how I wasn't even human. So maybe  I was human, after all,
but human like a  guy with three arms is human, or one of those guys in the
horror  movies  I saw,  gigantic  and  lumpy and  going  around hacking  up
teenagers whenever they was about to get laid. And in all those movies they
always try  to kill the guy  only they can't, he  gets stabbed and shot and
burned up and he still comes back, and that's like me, I must have tried to
kill myself so many times only it never worked.

No. Wait a minute.

I got to  get this straight, or you'll think I'm crazy  or a liar. I didn't
jump off that highway overpass like I said. I stood on one for a long time,
watching the  cars go by. Whenever a big old semi  came along I'd say, this
one, and I'd count,  and at the right second I'd say, now. Only I never did
jump. And  then afterward I dreamed about jumping,  and in all those dreams
I'd just bounce off the truck and get up and limp away. Like the time I was
a  kid  and sat  in  the bathroom  with  the little  gardening shears,  the
spring-loaded kind that popped  open, I sat there thinking about jamming it
into  my stomach  right under the  breastbone, and  then letting go  of the
handle, it'd pop  right open and make a bad wound and  cut open my heart or
something. I  was there  so long I fell  asleep on the toilet,  and later I
dreamed about doing it but no blood ever came out, because I couldn't die.

So I never tried to kill myself. But I thought about it all the time. I was
like  those monsters  in  those movies,  just killing  people  but secretly
hoping somebody would catch on to what was going on and kill me first.

And so I says to her, "Why didn't you just kill me?"

And there  she was with her  face close to mine and  she says, just like it
was love talk, she says, "I've had you in my rifle sights, Mick, and then I
didn't do  it. Because  I saw something in  you. I saw that  maybe you were
trying to control it. That maybe you didn't want to use your power to kill.
And so I let you live, thinking that one day I'd be here like this, telling
you what you are, and giving you a little hope."

I  thought she meant  I'd hope because  of knowing  my mama and  daddy were
alive and wanted me.

"I hoped for a long time, but I gave it up. I don't want to see my mama and
daddy, if  they could leave me  there all those years.  I don't want to see
you, neither, if you didn't so much as warn me not to get mad at Old Peleg.
I didn't  want to kill Old  Peleg, and I couldn't  even help it! You didn't
help me a bit!"

"We argued about it,"  she says. "We knew you were killing people while you
tried to  sort things out and  get control. Puberty's the  worst time, even
worse than infancy, and  we knew that if we didn't kill you a lot of people
would die-- and mostly  they'd be the people you loved best. That's the way
it is  for most  kids your age, they  get angriest at the  people they love
most, only  you couldn't help killing  them, and what does  that do to your
mind? What kind of  person do you become? There was some who said we didn't
have the  right to leave you  alive even to study  you, because it would be
like having a  cure for cancer and then not using it  on people just to see
how  fast  they'd  die.  Like that  experiment  where  the government  left
syphilis cases  untreated just to see what the  final stages of the disease
were like, even though  they could have cured those people at any time. But
some of us told  them, Mick isn't a disease, and a bullet isn't penicillin.
I told  them, Mick is something special. And  they said, yes, he's special,
he kills  more than any of  those other kids, and we  shot them or ran them
over with a truck  or drowned them, and here we've got the worst one of all
and you want to keep him alive."

And I was crying cause I wished they had killed me, but also because it was
the first  time I ever thought there was people arguing  that I ought to be
alive, and even though I didn't rightly understand then or even now why you
didn't kill me, I got to tell you that knowing somebody knew what I was and
still chose not to blast my head off, that done me in, I just bawled like a
baby.

One thing  led to another, there, my crying and  her holding me, and pretty
soon I figured out that she pretty much wanted to get laid right there. But
that just made me  sick, when I knew that. "How can you want to do that!" I
says to  her. "I  can't get married! I  can't have no kids!  They'd be like
me!"

She  didn't argue  with me  or say  nothing about  birth control, and  so I
figured out  later that  I was right, she  wanted to have a  baby, and that
told me plain that  she was crazy as a loon. I got  my pants pulled back up
and my shirt on, and I wouldn't look at her getting dressed again, neither.

"I could  make you  do it," she  says to me.  "I could do that  to you. The
ability you  have that lets you  kill also makes you  sensitive. I can make
you lose your mind with desire for me."

"Then why don't you?" I says.

"Why don't you kill if you can help it?" she says.

"Cause nobody has the right," says I.

"That's right," she says.

"Anyway you're ten years older than me," I tell her.

"Fifteen, " she says. "Almost twice your age. But that don't mean nothing."
Or I  guess she  actually said, "That  doesn't mean nothing,"  or probably,
"That doesn't mean anything." She talks better than I do but I can't always
remember the  fancy way. "That doesn't mean a  thing," she says. "You'll go
to your folks, and you can bet they'll have some pretty little girl waiting
for you, and she'll  know how to do it much better than me, she'll turn you
on so  your pants unzip themselves,  cause that's what they  want most from
you. They  want your  babies. As many  as they can get,  because you're the
strongest  they've produced in  all the  years since Grandpa  Jake realized
that the cursing power  went father to son, mother to daughter, and that he
could breed for it  like you breed dogs or horses. They'll breed you like a
stud, but  then when they find  out that you don't  like killing people and
you  don't want  to play  along and  you aren't  going to take  orders from
whoever's in charge there  now, they'll kill you. That's why I came to warn
you. We could feel them just starting to call you. We knew it was time. And
I came to warn you."

Most of  this didn't mean much  to me yet. just  the idea of having kinfolk
was still  so new I couldn't exactly get  worried about whether they'd kill
me or put me out for stud or whatever. Mostly what I thought about was her,
anyway. "I might have killed you, you know."

"Maybe I didn't care," she says. "And maybe I'm not so easy to kill."

"And maybe you ought to tell me your name," says I.

"Can't," she says.

"How come?" says I.

"Because if you decide to put in with them, and you know my name, then I am
dead."

"I wouldn't let anybody hurt you," says I.

She didn't answer that. She just says to me, "Mick, you don't know my name,
but you remember this. I have hopes for you, cause I know you're a good man
and you  never meant  to kill nobody.  I could've made  you love  me, and I
didn't, because I  want you to do what you do by  your own choice. And most
important of  all, if you  come with me, we  have a chance to  see if maybe
your ability doesn't have a good side."

You think  I hadn't thought of that before? When  I saw Rambo shooting down
all those  little brown  guys, I thought,  I could do that,  and without no
gun, either. And if  somebody took me hostage like the Achille Lauro thing,
we wouldn't have to worry about the terrorists going unpunished. They'd all
be rotting  in a hospital in no time. "Are you  with the government?" I ask
her.

"No," she says.

So they didn't want  me to be a soldier. I was kind of disappointed. I kind
of thought I might be useful that way. But I couldn't volunteer or nothing,
cause  you don't  walk into the  recruiting office  and say, I've  killed a
couple dozen  people by  giving sparks off  my body, and  I could  do it to
Castro and  Qaddafi if you like.  Cause if they believe  you, then you're a
murderer, and if they don't believe you, they lock you up in a nuthouse.

"Nobody's been  calling me, anyway," I says. "If I  didn't see you today, I
wouldn't've gone nowhere. I would've stayed with Mr. Kaiser."

"Then why did you take all your money out of the bank?" she says. "And when
you ran  away from  me, why did  you run toward  the highway  where you can
hitch a ride at least to Madison and then catch another on in to Eden?"

And I didn't have no answer for her then, cause I didn't know rightly why I
took  my money  out of  the bank  lessen it  was like  she said, and  I was
planning to  leave town. It was  just an impulse, to  close that account, I
didn't think nothing of  it, just stuffed three hundreds into my wallet and
come to  think of it I really was heading toward  Eden, I just didn't think
of it, I was just doing it. Just the way I climbed up that hill.

"They're stronger  than we are," she says. "So we  can't hold you here. You
have to  go anyway, you have  to work this thing out.  The most we could do
was just get you on the bus next to me, and then call you up this hill."

"Then why don't you come with me?" I says.

"They'd kill  me in two seconds,  right in front of  your eyes, and none of
this  cursing stuff,  either, Mick.  They'd just  take my  head off  with a
machete."

"Do they know you?"

"They know us," she says. "We're the only ones that know your people exist,
so we're the  only ones working to stop them. I won't  lie to you, Mick. If
you join  them, you can find  us, you'll learn how,  it isn't hard, and you
can do this stuff from farther away, you could really take us apart. But if
you join us, the tables are turned."

"Well maybe  I don't want to  he on either side in  this war," I says. "And
maybe now I won't go to Eden, neither. Maybe I'll go up to Washington, D.C.
and join the CIA."

"Maybe," she says.

"And don't try to stop me."

"I wouldn't try," she says.

"Damn straight,"  I says.  And then I just  walked on out, and  this time I
didn't  walk in no  circles, I just  headed north,  past her car,  down the
railroad right of way. And I caught a ride heading up toward D.C., and that
was that.

Except that  along about six o'clock  in the evening I  woke up and the car
was stopping and I  didn't know where I was, I must have slept all day, and
the guy says to me, "Here you are, Eden, North Carolina."

And I about messed my pants. "Eden!" I says.

"It wasn't  far out of my  way," he says. "I'm  heading for Burlington, and
these country  roads are  nicer than the  freeway, anyway. Don't  mind if I
never drive I-85 again, to tell the truth."

But  that was  the very guy  who told me  he had  business in D.C.,  he was
heading there  from Bristol, had to see  somebody from a government agency,
and here  he was  in Eden. It  made no sense  at all, except  for what that
woman told me. Somebody was calling me, and if I wouldn't come, they'd just
put me to sleep  and call whoever was driving. And there I was. Eden, North
Carolina. Scared to death,  or at least scared a little, but also thinking,
if what  she said  was true, my  folks was coming,  I was going  to meet my
folks.

Nothing much  changed in the two years since I  ran off from the orphanage.
Nothing much  ever changes  in Eden, which  isn't a real  town anyway, just
cobbled together from three  little villages that combined to save money on
city services.  People still mostly think of  them as three villages. There
wasn't  nobody who'd  get  too excited  about seeing  me, and  there wasn't
nobody I  wanted to see. Nobody living, anyway. I had  no idea how my folks
might find me, or  how I might find them, but in the meantime I went to see
about the  only people I ever  much cared about. Hoping  that they wouldn't
rise up out of the grave to get even with me for killing them.

It was  still full  day that time of  year, but it was  whippy weather, the
wind gusting and then  holding still, a big row of thunderclouds off to the
southwest, the  sun sinking down to get behind  them. The kind of afternoon
that promises  to cool  you off, which  suited me fine. I  was still pretty
dusty from  my climb  up the hill  that morning, and  I could  use a little
rain. Got  a Coke at a  fast food place and then walked  on over to see Old
Peleg.

He  was buried in  a little cemetery  right by  an old Baptist  Church. Not
Southern  Baptist, Black  Baptist,  meaning that  it didn't  have  no fancy
building  with classrooms  and  a rectory,  just a  stark-white block  of a
building  with a  little  steeple and  a lawn  that  looked like  it'd been
clipped by hand. Cemetery  was just as neat-kept. Nobody around, and it was
dim cause  of the thunderclouds moving through, but  I wasn't afraid of the
graves there,  I just went to  Old Peleg's cross. Never  knew his last name
was Lindley. Didn't sound  like a black man's name, but then when I thought
about  it I realized  that no last  name sounded  like a black  man's name,
because  Eden is  still  just old-fashioned  enough that  an old  black man
doesn't get called  by his last name much. He grew up  in a Jim Crow state,
and never  got around to insisting on being  called Mr. Lindley. Old Peleg.
Not that he ever  hugged me or took me on long walks or gave me that tender
loving care that makes  people get all teary-eyed about how wonderful it is
to have  parents. He  never tried to  be my dad  or nothing. And  if I hung
around him much, he  always gave me work to do and made  damn sure I did it
right,  and mostly  we didn't talk  about anything  except the work  we was
doing, which made me  wonder, standing there, why I wanted to cry and why I
hated myself  worse for  killing Old Peleg  than for any of  the other dead
people under the ground in that city.

I  didn't see  them and  I didn't hear  them coming  and I didn't  smell my
mama's perfume. But I  knew they was coming, because I felt the prickly air
between us. I didn't turn around, but I knew just where they were, and just
how far  off, because they was lively. Shedding sparks  like I never saw on
any living soul except  myself, just walking along giving off light. It was
like seeing  myself from  the outside for  the first time in  my life. Even
when she was making  me get all hot for her, that lady in Roanoke wasn't as
lively as them. They was just like me.

Funny thing was, that wrecked everything. I didn't want them to be like me.
I hated my sparkiness, and there they were, showing it to me, making me see
how a killer looks  from the outside. It took a few seconds to realize that
they  was  scared of  me,  too.  I recognized  how  scaredness looks,  from
remembering  how my  own bio-electrical  system got  shaped and  changed by
fear. Course I didn't think of it as a bio-electrical system then, or maybe
I  did cause  she'd already  told me, but  you know  what I mean.  They was
afraid of me. And I knew that was because I was giving off all the sparks I
shed when I  feel so mad at myself that I could  bust. I was standing there
at Old  Peleg's grave, hating myself,  so naturally they saw  me like I was
ready to  kill half a city.  They didn't know that it  was me I was hating.
Naturally  they figured  I  might be  mad at  them for  leaving me  at that
orphanage seventeen years ago. Serve them right, too, if I gave them a good
hard twist in the gut, but I don't do that, I honestly don't, not any more,
not  standing there  by Old  Peleg who I  loved a  lot more than  these two
strangers, I don't act out being a murderer when my shadow's falling across
his grave.

So I calmed myself  down as best I could and I turned around and there they
was, my  mama and  my daddy. And  I got to  tell you I  almost laughed. All
those years I watched them TV preachers, and we used to laugh till our guts
ached about  how Tammy  Bakker always wore  makeup so thick she  could be a
nigger underneath (it was  okay to say that cause Old Peleg himself said it
first)  and here  was my  mama, wearing  just as  much makeup and  her hair
sprayed so thick she could work construction without a hardhat. And smiling
that same  sticky phony smile, and crying the  same gooey oozey black tears
down her cheeks, and reaching out her hands just the right way so I halfway
expected her to say, "Praise to Lord Jesus," and then she actually says it,
"Praise to  Lord Jesus, it's  my boy," and comes  up and lays a  kiss on my
cheek with so much spit in it that it dripped down my face.

I wiped the slobber with my sleeve and felt my daddy have this little flash
of anger,  and I knew that  he thought I was judging  my mama and he didn't
like it.  Well, I was, I  got to admit. Her perfume  was enough to knock me
over, I swear she  must've mugged an Avon lady. And there was my daddy in a
fine blue suit like a businessman, his hair all blow-dried, so it was plain
he knew  just as well  as I did the  way real people are  supposed to look.
Probably he  was plain embarrassed to  be seen in public  with Mama, so why
didn't  he ever just  say, Mama, you  wear too  much makeup? That's  what I
thought, and  it wasn't till later that I realized  that when your woman is
apt to  give you cancer if  you rile her up, you  don't go telling her that
her face  looks like she slept in wet sawdust and  she smells like a whore.
White trash, that's what  my mama was, sure as if she was still wearing the
factory label.

"Sure am glad to see you, Son," says my daddy.

I didn't know  what to say, tell the truth. I wasn't  glad to see them, now
that I  saw them, because they wasn't exactly what  a orphan boy dreams his
folks is  like. So  I kind of grinned  and looked back down  at Old Peleg's
grave.

"You don't seem too surprised to see us," he says.

I could've  told him  right then about  the lady in Roanoke,  but I didn't.
Just didn't  feel right to tell  him. So I says,  "I felt like somebody was
calling me back here. And you two are the only people I met who's as sparky
as me. If you all say you're my folks, then I figure it must be so."

Mama giggled and she says to him, "Listen, Jesse, he calls it 'sparky.'"

"The word  we use  is 'dusty,' Son,"  says Daddy. "We say  a body's looking
dusty when he's one of us."

"You were  a very dusty baby,"  says Mama. "That's why  we knew we couldn't
keep you. Never seen such a dusty baby before. Papa Lem made us take you to
the orphanage before you even sucked one time. You never sucked even once."
And her mascara just flooded down her face.

"Now Deeny," says Daddy, "no need telling him everything right here."

Dusty. That was no sense at all. It didn't look like dust, it was flecks of
light, so  bright on me that  sometimes I had to squint  just to see my own
hands through the dazzle. "It don't look like dust," I says.

And Daddy says, "Well what do you think it looks like?"

And I says, "Sparks. That's why I call it being sparky."

"Well that's  what it looks like  to us, too," says  Daddy. "But we've been
calling it  'dusty' all our lives, and so I figure  it's easier for one boy
to change than for f-- for lots of other folks."

Well, now,  I learned a lot  of things right then  from what he said. First
off, I  knew he was  lying when he said  it looked like sparks  to them. It
didn't. It looked like what they called it. Dust. And that meant that I was
seeing it  a whole lot brighter  than they could see  it, and that was good
for me  to know, especially because it was plain  that Daddy didn't want me
to know it and so he pretended that he saw it the same way. He wanted me to
think he  was just  as good at  seeing as I  was. Which meant  that he sure
wasn't. And I also  learned that he didn't want me to know how many kinfolk
I  had, cause  he started  to say a  number that  started with F,  and then
caught himself  and didn't say  it. Fifty? Five hundred?  The number wasn't
half  so important  as the  fact that he  didn't want  me to know  it. They
didn't trust me. Well, why should they? Like the lady said, I was better at
this  than they  were,  and they  didn't know  how  mad I  was  about being
abandoned, and  the last thing they wanted to do  was turn me loose killing
folks. Especially themselves.

Well I stood there  thinking about that stuff and pretty soon it makes them
nervous and Mama says, "Now, Daddy, he can call it whatever he wants, don't
go making him mad or something."

And Daddy laughs and says, "He isn't mad, are you, Son?"

Can't they see for themselves? Course not. Looks like dust to them, so they
can't see it clear at all.

"You don't seem too happy to see us," says Daddy.

"Now, Jesse,"  says Mama, "don't go  pushing. Papa Lem said  don't you push
the boy,  you just  make his acquaintance, you  let him know why  we had to
push him out of  the nest so young, so now you explain it, Daddy, just like
Papa Lem said to."

For the  first time right then  it occurred to me  that my own folks didn't
want to come fetch me. They came because this Papa Lem made them do it. And
you can  bet they hopped and said yes, knowing how  Papa Lem used his-- but
I'll get to Papa Lem in good time, and you said I ought to take this all in
order, which I'm mostly trying to do.

Anyway Daddy  explained it just like the lady  in Roanoke, except he didn't
say  a word  about  bio-electrical systems,  he  said that  I was  "plainly
chosen" from the moment of my birth, that I was "one of the elect," which I
remembered from  Baptist Sunday  School meant that  I was one  that God had
saved, though  I never heard of  anybody who was saved  the minute they was
born and  not even baptized or  nothing. They saw how  dusty I was and they
knew I'd  kill a  lot of people  before I got  old enough to  control it. I
asked  them if  they  did it  a lot,  putting a  baby out  to be  raised by
strangers.

"Oh, maybe a dozen times," says Daddy.

"And it always works out okay?" says I.

He got set to  lie again, I could see it by ripples  in the light. I didn't
know lying  could be so plain, which made me glad  they saw dust instead of
sparks. "Most times," he says.

"I'd like  to meet one of  them others," says I. "I figure  we got a lot in
common, growing  up thinking our parents hated us,  when the truth was they
was scared of their own baby."

"Well they're  mostly grown up and gone off," he says,  but it's a lie, and
most important  of all was the  fact that here I as  much as said I thought
they wasn't worth horse pucky as parents and the only thing Daddy can think
of to  say is why I  can't see none of the  other "orphans," which tells me
that whatever he's lying to cover up must be real important.

But I  didn't push him right  then, I just looked  back down at Old Peleg's
grave and wondered if he ever told a lie in his life.

Daddy says,  "I'm not surprised to find you here."  I guess he was nervous,
and had to change the subject. "He's one you dusted, isn't he?"

Dusted. That word made  me so mad. What I done to Old Peleg wasn't dusting.
And being  mad must have changed  me enough they could  see the change. But
they didn't  know what it meant, cause Mama says to  me, "Now, Son, I don't
mean to  criticize, but it isn't  right to take pride  in the gifts of God.
That's why we came  to find you, because we need to teach you why God chose
you to be one of the elect, and you shouldn't glory in yourself because you
could strike  down your  enemies. Rather you  should give all  glory to the
Lord, praise his name, because we are his servants."

I like to puked,  I was so mad at that. Glory! Old Peleg, who was worth ten
times these  two phony white people who tossed me  out before I ever sucked
tit, and  they thought I should  give the glory for  his terrible agony and
death to God? I  didn't know God all that well, mostly because I thought of
him as  looking as pinched up and serious as  Mrs. Bethel who taught Sunday
School when I was  little, until she died of leukemia, and I just never had
a thing  to say to God.  But if God gave  me that power to  strike down Old
Peleg, and God wanted  the glory for it when I was done,  then I did have a
few words to  say to God. Only I didn't believe it  for a minute. Old Peleg
believed in God, and the God he believed in didn't go striking an old black
man dead because a dumb kid got pissed off at him.

But I'm  getting off  track in the  story, because that was  when my father
touched me for the first time. His hand was shaking. And it had every right
to shake,  because I was so  mad that a year  ago he would've been bleeding
from the  colon before he took  his hand away. But I'd  got so I could keep
from killing  whoever touched  me when I  was mad, and the  funny thing was
that his hand shaking  kind of changed how I felt anyway. I'd been thinking
about how mad I  was that they left me and how mad  I was that they thought
I'd be  proud of  killing people but now  I realized how brave  they was to
come fetch me, cause  how did they know I wouldn't kill them? But they came
anyway. And  that's something.  Even if Papa  Lem told them to  do it, they
came, and now I realized that it was real brave for Mama to come kiss me on
the cheek  right then, because if  I was going to  kill her, she touched me
and gave  me a chance to  do it before she  even tried to explain anything.
Maybe it  was her  strategy to win me  over or something, but  it was still
brave. And  she also didn't approve of people  being proud of murder, which
was more points in  her favor. And she had the guts to  tell me so right to
my  face. So  I chalked  up some points  for Mama.  She might look  like as
sickening as Tammy Bakker, but she faced her killer son with more guts than
Daddy had.

He touched  my shoulder and they  led me to their  car. A Lincoln Town Car,
Which they  probably thought would impress me, but  all I thought about was
what it would've been  like at the Children's Home if we'd had the price of
that car,  even fifteen  years ago. Maybe  a paved basketball  court. Maybe
some decent toys that wasn't broken-up hand-me-downs. Maybe some pants with
knees in  them. I never felt  so poor in my  life as when I  slid onto that
fuzzy seat and heard the stereo start playing elevator music in my ear.

There was somebody else in the car. Which made sense. If I'd killed them or
something,  they'd need  somebody  else to  drive the  car,home,  right? He
wasn't  much, when it  came to being  dusty or  sparky or whatever.  Just a
little, and  in rhythms  of fear, too. And  I could see why  he was scared,
cause he  was holding a blindfold in his hands, and  he says, "Mr. Yow, I'm
afraid I got to put this on you."

Well, I  didn't answer  for a second,  which made him more  scared cause he
thought I was  mad, but mostly it took me that long  to realize he meant me
when he said "Mr. Yow."

"That's our  name, Son," says my daddy. "I'm Jesse  Yow, and your mother is
Minnie Rae Yow, and that makes you Mick Yow."

"Don't it figure," says I. I was joking, but they took it wrong, like as if
I was making fun of their name. But I been Mick Winger so long that it just
feels silly  calling myself Yow, and  the fact is it  is a funny name. They
said it like I  should be proud of it, though, which makes me laugh, but to
them it  was the name of God's Chosen People, like  the way the Jews called
themselves Israelites in the Bible. I didn't know that then, but that's the
way they said  it, real proud. And they was ticked off  when I made a joke,
so I helped them  feel better by letting Billy put on-- Billy's the name of
the man in the car-- put on the blindfold.

It was a  lot of country roads, and a lot of  country talk. About kinfolk I
never  met, and  how I'd love  this person  and that person,  which sounded
increasingly unlikely to me,  if you know what I mean. A long-lost child is
coming home  and you  put a blindfold on  him. I knew we  were going mostly
east, cause  of the times I  could feel the sun coming  in my window and on
the back of my neck, but that was about it, and that wasn't much. They lied
to me,  they wouldn't show me  nothing, they was scared  of me. I mean, any
way you  look at  it, they wasn't  exactly killing the fatted  calf for the
prodigal son. I was definitely on probation. Or maybe even on trial. Which,
I might  point out,  is exactly the  way you been  treating me,  too, and I
don't like it much better now than I did then, if you don't mind me putting
some  personal  complaints into  this.  I  mean, somewhere  along the  line
somebody's  going to  have  to decide  whether to  shoot me  or let  me go,
because I  can't control my temper  forever locked up like  a rat in a box,
and the  difference is a rat  can't reach out of the  box and blast you the
way I  can, so somewhere along  the way somebody's going  to have to figure
out that  you better either trust me or kill  me. My personal preference is
for trusting  me, since I've given you more reason  to trust me than you've
given me to trust you so far.

But anyway  I rode along  in the car for  more than an hour.  We could have
gotten to Winston or Greensboro or Danville by then, it was so long, and by
the time  we got there nobody  was talking and from  the snoring, Billy was
even asleep.

I wasn't  asleep, though. I was watching. Cause I  don't see sparks with my
eyes, I  see it with something else, like as if  my sparks see other folks'
sparks, if you catch  my drift, and so that blindfold might've kept me from
seeing the road, but  it sure didn't keep me from seeing the other folks in
the car  with me.  I knew right where  they were, and right  what they were
feeling. Now, I've always had a knack for telling things about people, even
when I couldn't see  nary a spark or nothing, but this was the first time I
ever saw  anybody who  was sparky besides  me. So I sat  there watching how
Mama  and Daddy  acted with each  other even  when they wasn't  touching or
saying a thing, just little drifts of anger or fear or- -well, I looked for
love, but I  didn't see it, and I know what it  looks like, cause I've felt
it. They  were like  two armies camped  on opposite hills,  waiting for the
truce to end at dawn. Careful. Sending out little scouting parties.

Then the  more I got used  to understanding what my  folks was thinking and
feeling toward each other,  the easier it got for me to read what Billy had
going on inside him. It's like after you learn to read big letters, you can
read little  letters, too,  and I wondered  if maybe I could  even learn to
understand people  who didn't  have hardly any  sparks at all.  I mean that
occurred  to me,  anyway, and since  then I've  found out that  it's mostly
true. Now  that I've  had some practice I  can read a sparky  person from a
long  ways off,  and even  regular folks  I can  do a little  reading, even
through walls  and windows. But I found that out  later. Like when you guys
have been watching me through mirrors. I can also see your microphone wires
in the walls.

Anyway it was during that car ride that I first started seeing what I could
see with  my eyes closed, the shape  of people's bio-electrical system, the
color and spin of it, the speed and the flow and the rhythm and whatever, I
mean those are the  words I use, cause there isn't exactly a lot of books I
can read on the  subject. Maybe that Swedish doctor has fancy words for it.
I can only tell  you how it feels to me. And in  that hour I got to be good
enough at  it that I could tell Billy was seared,  all right, but he wasn't
all that  scared of me, he  was mostly scared of Mama  and Daddy. Me he was
jealous of, angry kind  of. Scared a little, too, but mostly mad. I thought
maybe he was mad cause I was coming in out of nowhere already sparkier than
him, but  then it  occurred to me  that he probably couldn't  even tell how
sparky  I was, because  to him it'd  look like  dust, and he  wouldn't have
enough  of a knack  at it to  see much  distinction between one  person and
another. It's  like the  more light you  give off, the clearer  you can see
other people's  light. So I was the one with the  blindfold on, but I could
see clearer than anybody else in that car.

We drove  on gravel for about  ten minutes, and then  on a bumpy dirt road,
and  then suddenly  on asphalt  again, smooth  as you  please, for  about a
hundred yards,  and then we stopped.  I didn't wait for  a by-your-leave, I
had that blindfold off in half a second.

It was like a whole town of houses, but right among the trees, not a gap in
the leaves  overhead. Maybe fifty,  sixty houses, some of  them pretty big,
but the  trees made them half invisible,  it being summer. Children running
all  over,   scruffy  dirty  kids  from   diapered-up  snot-nose  brats  to
most-growed  kids not  all that  much younger  than me.  They sure  kept us
cleaner in the Children's Home. And they was all sparky. Mostly like Billy,
just a  little, but it explained  why they wasn't much  washed. There isn't
many a mama who'd  stuff her kid in a tub if the kid can make her sick just
by getting mad.

It must've been near  eight-thirty at night, and even the little kids still
wasn't in  bed. They  must let their kids  play till they get  wore out and
drop down and fall  asleep by themselves. It came to me that maybe I wasn't
so bad  off growing up in an orphanage. At least  I knew manners and didn't
whip it out and  pee right in front of company, the way one little boy did,
just looking at me while I got out of the car, whizzing away like he wasn't
doing nothing  strange. Like a dog  marking trees. He needed  to so he done
it. If I ever did that at the Children's Home they'd've slapped me silly.

I know how to act with strangers when I'm hitching a ride, but not when I'm
being  company, cause  orphans don't go  calling much  so I never  had much
experience. So I'd've been shy no matter what, even if there wasn't no such
thing as  sparkiness. Daddy was all  set to take me  to meet Papa Lem right
off, but  Mama saw how I  wasn't cleaned up and  maybe she guessed I hadn't
been to the toilet in a while and so she hustled me into a house where they
had a good  shower and when I came out she had  a cold ham sandwich waiting
for me on the table. On a plate, and the plate was setting on a linen place
mat, and there  was a tall glass of milk there, so  cold it was sweating on
the outside of the  glass. I mean, if an orphan kid ever dreamed of what it
might  be like  to have  a mama, that  was the  dream. Never mind  that she
didn't look  like a model in the Sears catalog.  I felt clean, the sandwich
tasted good, and when I was done eating she even offered me a cookie.

It felt good, I'll  admit that, but at the same time I felt cheated. It was
just  too damn  late. I needed  it to be  like this  when I was  seven, not
seventeen.

But she  was trying, and it  wasn't all her fault, so  I ate the cookie and
drank off the last of the milk and my watch said it was after nine. Outside
it was  dusk now, and  most of the kids  were finally gone off  to bed, and
Daddy comes in and says, "Papa Lem says he isn't getting any younger."

He was  outside, in a big rocking chair sitting  on the grass. You wouldn't
call him  fat, but he  did have a belly  on him. And you  wouldn't call him
old, but  he was bald on  top and his hair was  wispy yellow and white. And
you wouldn't call  him ugly, but he had a soft mouth  and I didn't like the
way it twisted up when he talked.

Oh, hell, he was  fat, old, and ugly, and I hated him from the first time I
saw him. A squishy kind of guy. Not even as sparky as my daddy, neither, so
you didn't get to  be in charge around here just by having more of whatever
it was  made us different. I  wondered how close kin he  was to me. If he's
got  children, and  they look  like him,  they ought  to drown them  out of
mercy.

"Mick Yow," he says to me, "Mick my dear boy, Mick my dear cousin."

"Good evening, sir," says I.

"Oh, and  he's got manners," says  he. "We were right  to donate so much to
the Children's Home. They took excellent care of you."

"You donated to the home?" says I. If they did, they sure didn't give much.

"A  little,"  he says.  "Enough  to  pay for  your  food,  your room,  your
Christian education. But no  luxuries. You couldn't grow up soft, Mick. You
had to grow up lean and strong. And you had to know suffering, so you could
be  compassionate. The  Lord God has  given you  a marvelous gift,  a great
helping of his grace, a heaping plateful of the power of God, and we had to
make sure  you were truly worthy  to sit up to the  table at the banquet of
the Lord."

I almost  looked around  to see if there  was a camera, he  sounded so much
like the preachers on TV.

And  he says,  "Mick,  you have  already passed  the  first test.  You have
forgiven your parents for leaving you to think you were an orphan. You have
kept that holy commandment,  Honor thy father and mother, that thy days may
be long upon the land which the Lord thy God hath given thee. You know that
if you had raised a hand against them, the Lord would have struck you down.
For verily  I say  unto you that  there was two  rifles pointed  at you the
whole time, and if  your father and mother had walked away without you, you
would have  flopped down dead in that nigger cemetery,  for God will not be
mocked."

I couldn't  tell if he  was trying to provoke  me or scare me  or what, but
either way, it was working.

"The Lord  has chosen you for his servant, Mick,  just like he's chosen all
of us. The rest  of the world doesn't understand this. But Grandpa Jake saw
it. Long  ago, back  in 1820, he  saw how everybody  he hated had  a way of
dying without him lifting a finger. And for a time he thought that maybe he
was like those old  witches, who curse people and they wither up and die by
the power of  the devil. But he was a god-fearing man,  and he had no truck
with Satan. He was  living in rough times, when a man was likely to kill in
a quarrel,  but Grandpa Jake never  killed. Never even struck  out with his
fists. He  was a  peaceable man, and he  kept his anger inside  him, as the
Lord  commands in  the New  Testament. So  surely he  was not a  servant of
Satan!"

Papa Lem's voice rang  through that little village, he was talking so loud,
and I  noticed there was a  bunch of people all  around. Not many kids now,
all grown-ups, maybe there to hear Lem, but even more likely they was there
to see me. Because it was like the lady in Roanoke said, there wasn't a one
of them was half as sparky as me. I didn't know if they could all see that,
but I could. Compared to normal folks they was all dusty enough, I suppose,
but compared  to me, or  even to my mama  and daddy, they was  a pretty dim
bunch.

"He studied  the scriptures to find out what it  meant that his enemies all
suffered from  tumors and bleeding and  coughing and rot, and  he came upon
the verse  of Genesis where the Lord said unto  Abraham, 'I will bless them
that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.' And he knew in his heart
that the Lord had  chosen him the way he chose Abraham. And when Isaac gave
the blessing of God  to Jacob, he said, 'Let people serve thee, and nations
bow down to thee:  cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he
that  blesseth thee.'  The  promises to  the patriarchs  were  fulfilled in
Grandpa Jake, for whoever cursed him was cursed by God."

When he said those words from the Bible, Papa Lem sounded like the voice of
God himself, I've got  to tell you. I felt exalted, knowing that it was God
who gave such power  to my family. It was to the whole family, the way Papa
Lem told  it, because the Lord promised Abraham  that his children would be
as many  as there was  stars in the sky,  which is a lot  more than Abraham
knew about  seeing how  he didn't have  no telescope. And  that promise now
applied to  Grandpa Jake,  just like the  one that said "in  thee shall all
families of the earth be blessed." So Grandpa Jake set to studying the book
of Genesis so he could fulfill those promises just like the patriarchs did.
He saw  how they went  to a lot of  trouble to make sure  they only married
kinfolk-- you  know how Abraham married  his brother's daughter, Sarah, and
Isaac married  his cousin Rebekah,  and Jacob married his  cousins Leah and
Rachel. So Grandpa Jake left his first wife cause she was unworthy, meaning
she probably wasn't particularly  sparky, and he took up with his brother's
daughter and  when his brother threatened to kill him if  he laid a hand on
the girl, Grandpa Jake run off with her and his own brother died of a curse
which is just exactly  what happened to Sarah's father in the Bible. I mean
Grandpa  Jake worked  it  out just  right. And  he made  sure all  his sons
married their first cousins,  and so all of them had sparkiness twice over,
just like  breeding pointers with  pointers and not mixing  them with other
breeds, so the strain stays pure.

There was  all kinds of other stuff about Lot and  his daughters, and if we
remained faithful  then we would be the meek  who inherit the Earth because
we  were the  chosen people and  the Lord  would strike down  everybody who
stood in our way,  but what it all came down to at the moment was this: You
marry  whoever the  patriarch  tells you  to marry,  and  Papa Lem  was the
patriarch.  He  had  my   mama  marry  my  daddy  even  though  they  never
particularly  liked each other,  growing up  cousins, because he  could see
that they was both specially chosen, which means to say they was both about
the  sparkiest there  was. And  when I was  born, they  knew it was  like a
confirmation of Papa Lem's decision, because the Lord had blessed them with
a kid who gave off dust thicker than a dump truck on a dirt road.

One thing he asked me real particular was whether I ever been laid. He says
to  me, "Have  you spilled  your seed  among the  daughters of  Ishmael and
Esau?"

I  knew what spilling  seed was, cause  we got  lectures about that  at the
Children's Home.  I wasn't sure who the daughters  of Ishmael and Esau was,
but since  I never had a  hot date, I figured I  was pretty safe saying no.
Still, I  did consider a second, because what came to  mind was the lady in
Roanoke, stoking  me up  just by wanting  me, and I was  thinking about how
close I'd come to not being a virgin after all. I wondered if the lady from
Roanoke was a daughter of Esau.

Papa Lem picked up  on my hesitation, and he wouldn't let it go. "Don't lie
to me boy. I  can see a lie." Well, since I could see a lie, I didn't doubt
but what  maybe he could too. But then again,  I've had plenty of grown-ups
tell me they could  spot a lie-- but half the time they accused me of lying
when I  was telling the truth,  and the other half  they believed me when I
was telling  whoppers so big it'd take two big  men to carry them upstairs.
So maybe  he could  and maybe he couldn't.  I figured I'd tell  him just as
much truth as  I wanted. "I was just embarrassed to tell  you I never had a
girl," I says.

"Ah, the deceptions of  the world," he says. "They make promiscuity seem so
normal that  a boy is  ashamed to admit that  he is chaste." Then  he got a
glint  in his eye.  "I know the  children of  Esau have been  watching you,
wanting to steal your birthright. Isn't that so?"

"I don't know who Esau is," says I.

The folks who was gathered around us started muttering about that.

I says,  "I mean,  I know who  he was in  the Bible, he was  the brother of
Jacob, the one who sold him his birthright for split pea soup."

"Jacob was  the rightful  heir, the true  eldest son," says  Papa Lem, "and
don't you  forget it.  Esau is the one  who went away from  his father, out
into the wilderness, rejecting the things of God and embracing the lies and
sins of the world. Esau is the one who married a strange woman, who was not
of the people! Do you understand me?"

I understood  pretty good  by then. Somewhere  along the line  somebody got
sick of  living under the thumb of Papa Lem,  or maybe the patriarch before
him, and they split.

"Beware," says  Papa Lem, "because  the children of Esau  and Ishmael still
covet the blessings of Jacob. They want to corrupt the pure seed of Grandpa
Jake.  They have  enough  of the  blessing of  God  to know  that  you're a
remarkable boy, like Joseph  who was sold into Egypt, and they will come to
you  with their  whorish  plans, the  way Potiphar's  wife came  to Joseph,
trying to  persuade you to give  them your pure and  undefiled seed so that
they can have the blessing that their fathers rejected."

I got to tell  you that I didn't much like having him talk about my seed so
much in  front of mixed company,  but that was nothing  compared to what he
did next. He  waved his hand to a girl standing there  in the crowd, and up
she came.  She wasn't half bad-looking, in a country  sort of way. Her hair
was mousy  and she wasn't altogether clean and  she stood with a two-bucket
slouch, but  her face wasn't bad  and she looked to  have her teeth. Sweet,
but not my type, if you know what I mean.

Papa Lem introduced us.  It was his daughter, which I might've guessed, and
then he says to  her, "Wilt thou go with this man?" And she looks at me and
says, "I will go." And then she gave me this big smile, and all of a sudden
it was  happening again,  just like it  did with the lady  in Roanoke, only
twice as much, cause  after all the lady in Roanoke wasn't hardly sparky. I
was standing  there and  all I could think  about was how I  wanted all her
clothes off her and  to do with her right there in front of everybody and I
didn't even care that  all those people were watching, that's how strong it
was.

And I liked it,  I got to tell you. I mean you  don't ignore a feeling like
that. But  another part  of me was standing  back and it says  to me, "Mick
Winger you  damn fool, that girl's as homely as  the bathroom sink, and all
these people  are watching her make  an idiot out of  you," and it was that
part of me that  got mad, because I didn't like her making me do something,
and  I didn't  like it  happening right  out in  front of everybody,  and I
specially didn't  like Papa Lem  sitting there looking at  his own daughter
and me like we was in a dirty magazine.

Thing is, when I get mad I get all sparky, and the madder I got, the more I
could see how  she was doing it, like she was a  magnet, drawing me to her.
And  as soon  as I  thought of  it like  us being  magnets, I took  all the
sparkiness  from being  mad  and I  used it.  Not to  hurt her  or nothing,
because I  didn't put it on  her the way I did with  the people I killed. I
just  kind of  turned the  path of  her sparks  plain upside down.  She was
spinning it just as fast as ever, but it went the other way, and the second
that started, why, it was like she disappeared. I mean, I could see her all
right, but I couldn't hardly notice her. I couldn't focus my eyes on her.

Papa Lem jumped right to his feet, and the other folks were gasping. Pretty
quick that  girl stopped sparking at me, you can bet,  and there she was on
her knees, throwing up. She must've had a real weak digestion, or else what
I done was stronger  than I thought. She was really pouring on the juice, I
guess, and  when I flung it  back at her and  turned her upside down, well,
she couldn't  hardly walk when they got her  up. She was pretty hysterical,
too, crying about how awful and ugly I was, which might've hurt my feelings
except that I was scared to death.

Papa Lem  was looking  like the wrath  of God. "You have  rejected the holy
sacrament of marriage! You have spurned the handmaid God prepared for you!"

Now  you've got to  know that I  hadn't put  everything together yet,  or I
wouldn't have been so afraid of him, but for all I knew right then he could
kill me with a cancer. And it was a sure thing he could've had those people
beat me to death  or whatever he wanted, so maybe I was right to be scared.
Anyway I  had to think of  a way to make  him not be mad  at me, and what I
came up with must not've been too bad because it worked, didn't it?

I  says to  him, as calm  as I can,  "Papa Lem,  she was not  an acceptable
handmaiden." I didn't watch  all those TV preachers for nothing. I knew how
to talk like the  Bible. I says, "She was not blessed enough to be my wife.
She wasn't  even as  blessed as my mama.  You can't tell me  that she's the
best the Lord prepared for me."

And sure enough, he calmed right down. "I know that," he says. And he isn't
talking like  a preacher any more, it's me talking  like a preacher and him
talking all meek. "You  think I don't know it? It's those children of Esau,
that's what it is, Mick, you got to know that. We had five girls who were a
lot dustier than her, but we had to put them out into other families, cause
they  were like  you,  so strong  they  would've killed  their own  parents
without meaning to."

And I says, "Well, you brought me back, didn't you?"

And he says, "Well you were alive, Mick, and you got to admit that makes it
easier."

"You mean those girls're all dead?" I says.

"The children of Esau," he says. "Shot three of them, strangled one, and we
never found the body of the other. They never lived to be ten years old."

And  I thought  about how the  lady in Roanoke  told me  she had me  in her
gunsights a few times.

But she  let me live. Why? For my seed? Those  girls would've had seed too,
or whatever.  But they  killed those girls  and let me live.  I didn't know
why. Hell,  I still don't, not  if you mean to keep  me locked up like this
for the rest of  my life. I mean you might as well have blasted my head off
when I was six,  and then I can name you a dozen  good folks who'd still be
alive, so no thanks for the favor if you don't plan to let me go.

Anyway, I says to him, "I didn't know that. I'm sorry."

And he  says to me, "Mick, I can see how  you'd be disappointed, seeing how
you're so blessed by the Lord. But I promise you that my daughter is indeed
the best  girl of marriageable age that we've got  here. I wasn't trying to
foist her  off on you because  she's my daughter-- it  would be blasphemous
for me to try  it, and I'm a true servant of the  Lord. The people here can
testify for  me, they can tell you that I'd never  give you my own daughter
unless she was the best we've got."

If  she  was the  best they  got  then I  had  to figure  the laws  against
inbreeding made pretty good  sense. But I says to him, "Then maybe we ought
to wait and see if there's somebody younger, too young to marry right now."
I remembered the story of Jacob from Sunday School, and since they set such
store by  Jacob I  figured it'd work.  I says, "Remember  that Jacob served
seven years before he got to marry Rachel. I'm willing to wait."

That impressed  hell out of him, you can bet. He  says, "You truly have the
prophetic spirit,  Mick. I have no doubt that someday  you'll be Papa in my
place, when  the Lord  has gathered me  unto my fathers. But  I hope you'll
also remember  that Jacob  married Rachel, but  he first married  the older
daughter, Leah."

The ugly  one, I thought, but  I didn't say it. I  just smiled and told him
how  I'd remember  that,  and there  was plenty  of time  to talk  about it
tomorrow, because it  was dark now and I was tired and  a lot of things had
happened to  me today that I  had to think over.  I was really getting into
the spirit of this Bible thing, and so I says to him, "Remember that before
Jacob could dream of the ladder into heaven, he had to sleep."

Everybody laughed, but Papa Lem wasn't satisfied yet. He was willing to let
the  marriage thing  wait  for a  few days.  But there  was one  thing that
couldn't wait. He looks  me in the eye and he says, "Mick, you got a choice
to make. The Lord  says those who aren't for me are against me. Joshua said
choose ye  this day whom ye will serve. And Moses  said, 'I call heaven and
earth to  record this day against you, that I have  set before you life and
death, blessing and cursing:  therefore choose life, that both thou and thy
seed may live.'"

Well I don't think you can put it much plainer than that. I could choose to
live there  among the chosen people,  surrounded by dirty kids  and a slimy
old man telling me  who to marry and whether I could raise my own children,
or I could choose to leave and get my brains blasted out or maybe just pick
up a  stiff dose of cancer.  I wasn't altogether sure  whether they'd do it
quick or slow. I kind of figured they'd do it quick, though, so I'd have no
chance to spill my seed among the daughters of Esau.

So I  gave him my most  solemn and hypocritical promise  that I would serve
the Lord  and live among them  all the days of my life.  Like I told you, I
didn't know whether he  could tell if I was lying or not. But he nodded and
smiled so it looked  like he believed me. Trouble was, I knew he was lying,
and so that  meant he didn't believe me, and that meant  I was in deep poo,
as Mr.  Kaiser's boy Greggy always  said. In fact, he  was pretty angry and
pretty scared, too, even  though he tried to hide it by smiling and keeping
a  lid on  himself. But  I knew  that he  knew that  I had no  intention of
staying  there with  those crazy  people who  knocked up their  cousins and
stayed about  as ignorant  as I ever  saw. Which meant that  he was already
planning to kill me, and sooner rather than later.

No, I better tell the truth here, cause I wasn't that smart. It wasn't till
I was halfway to the house that I really wondered if he believed me, and it
wasn't till  Mama had  me with a  nice clean pair  of pajamas up  in a nice
clean room, and she  was about to take my jeans and shirt and underwear and
make them nice  and clean that it occurred to me that  maybe I was going to
wish I  had more clothes on  than pajamas that night.  I really got kind of
mad before she finally gave me back my clothes-- she was scared that if she
didn't do what I  said, I'd do something to her. And then I got to thinking
that  maybe I'd  made  things even  worse by  not  giving her  the clothes,
because that might make  them think that I was planning to skip out, and so
maybe they weren't planning  to kill me before but now they would, and so I
probably just made things worse. Except when it came down to it, I'd rather
be wrong  about the one thing  and at least have  my clothes, than be wrong
about  the  other thing  and  have to  gallivant  all over  the country  in
pajamas. You  don't get much mileage on  country roads barefoot in pajamas,
even in the summer.

As soon as Mama left and went on downstairs, I got dressed again, including
my shoes, and climbed  in under the covers. I'd slept out in the open, so I
didn't  mind sleeping  in my clothes.  What drove  me crazy was  getting my
shoes on  the sheets. They would've  yelled at me so  bad at the Children's
Home.

I laid there in  the dark, trying to think what I was going to do. I pretty
much knew how  to get from this house out to the  road, but what good would
that do me? I  didn't know where I was or where the  road led or how far to
go, and  you don't cut cross country in North  Carolina-- if you don't trip
over something  in the dark,  you'll bump into some  moonshine or marijuana
operation and  they'll blast  your head off,  not to mention  the danger of
getting your throat bit out by some tobacco farmer's mean old dog. So there
I'd be running along  a road that leads nowhere with them on my tail and if
they wanted  to run me down,  I don't think fear  of cancer would slow down
your average four-wheeler.

I thought  about maybe stealing a car, but I don't  have the first idea how
to  hotwire anything.  It  wasn't one  of the  skills  you pick  up  at the
Children's Home.  I knew  the idea of  it, somewhat, because  I'd done some
reading on  electricity with the books Mr. Kaiser lent  me so I could maybe
try getting  ready for the GED, but there wasn't a  chapter in there on how
to get  a Lincoln running without a key. Didn't  know how to drive, either.
All the stuff  you pick up from your dad or from  your friends at school, I
just never picked up at all.

Maybe I dozed off,  maybe I didn't. But I suddenly noticed that I could see
in the dark. Not see, of course. Feel the people moving around. Not far off
at first,  except like  a blur, but I  could feel the near  ones, the other
ones in the  house. It was cause they was sparky, of  course, but as I laid
there feeling  them drifting  here and there,  in the rhythms  of sleep and
dreams, or walking around,  I began to realize that I'd been feeling people
all along,  only I  didn't know it.  They wasn't sparky, but  I always knew
where they  were, like shadows drifting in the back  of your mind. I didn't
even know  that I knew it,  but they were there.  It's like when Diz Riddle
got him his glasses  when he was ten years old and all  of a sudden he just
went around whooping and yelling about all the stuff he saw. He always used
to see it before,  but he didn't rightly know what half the stuff was. Like
pictures on coins. He knew the coins was bumpy, but he didn't know they was
pictures and writing and stuff. That's how this was.

I laid there and  I could make a map in my brain  where I could see a whole
bunch of  different people, and the  more I tried, the  better I could see.
Pretty  soon it  wasn't  just in  that house.  I could  feel them  in other
houses,  dimmer and  fainter. But  in my mind  I didn't  see no walls  so I
didn't know  whether somebody was in the kitchen or  in the bathroom, I had
to think  it out, and it  was hard, it took  all my concentration. The only
guide  I had  was  that I  could see  electric wires  when the  current was
flowing through them, so  wherever a light was on or a clock was running or
something, I  could feel this thin line, really  thin, not like the shadows
of people.  It wasn't much, but  it gave me some idea  of where some of the
walls might be.

If I  could've just told who  was who I might  have made some guesses about
what they was doing.  Who was asleep and who was awake. But I couldn't even
tell who was a kid and who was a grown-up, cause I couldn't see sizes, just
brightness. Brightness  was the only way  I knew who was  close and who was
far.

I  was pure  lucky I got  so much sleep  during the  day when that  guy was
giving me  a ride from Roanoke  to Eden. Well, that  wasn't lucky, I guess,
since I wished I  hadn't gone to Eden at all, but at least having that long
nap meant  that I had a  better shot at staying  awake until things quieted
down.

There was a clump  of them in the next house. It was hard to sort them out,
cause three  of them was a lot brighter, so I  thought they was closer, and
it took a while to realize that it was probably Mama and Daddy and Papa Lem
along with  some others. Anyway it  was a meeting, and  it broke up after a
while, and  all except Papa Lem  came over. I didn't  know what the meeting
was about, but I  knew they was scared and mad. Mostly scared. Well, so was
I.  But I  calmed myself  down, the  way I'd  been practicing, so  I didn't
accidently  kill nobody.  That kind  of practice  made it  so I  could keep
myself from  getting too lively and  sparky, so they'd think  I was asleep.
They didn't  see as  clear as I did,  too, so that'd help.  I thought maybe
they'd  all come up  and get me,  but no,  they just all  waited downstairs
while one of  them came up, and he didn't come in  and get me, neither. All
he did was go to the other rooms and wake up whoever was sleeping there and
get them downstairs and out of the house.

Well, that scared me  worse than ever. That made it plain what they had in,
mind,  all right.  Didn't want  me giving  off sparks and  killing somebody
close by when they  attacked me. Still, when I thought about it, I realized
that it  was also  a good sign.  They was scared  of me, and  rightly so. I
could  reach farther and  strike harder than  any of  them. And they  saw I
could throw  off what got tossed  at me, when I  flung back what Papa Lem's
daughter tried to do to me. They didn't know how much I could do.

Neither did I.

Finally all  the people  was out of  the house except  the ones downstairs.
There  was others  outside  the house,  maybe  watching, maybe  not, but  I
figured I better not try to climb out the window.

Then  somebody started  walking up  the stairs  again, alone.  There wasn't
nobody else  to fetch down, so  they could only be  coming after me. It was
just one  person, but  that didn't do me  no good-- even one  grown man who
knows how to use  a knife is better off than me. I still don't have my full
growth on me, or  at least I sure hope I don't, and  the only fights I ever
got in  were slugging matches in  the yard. For a  minute I wished I'd took
kung fu lessons instead of sitting around reading math and science books to
make up for dropping out of school so young. A lot of good math and science
was going to do me if I was dead.

The  worst thing  was I  couldn't see  him. Maybe  they just moved  all the
children out  of the house so  they wouldn't make noise  in the morning and
wake me. Maybe they  was just being nice. And this guy coming up the stairs
might just be checking  on me or bringing me clean clothes or something-- I
couldn't tell. So how  could I twist him up, when I didn't know if they was
trying to  kill me or what?  But if he was trying to  kill me, I'd wish I'd
twisted him before he ever came into the room with me.

Well, that  was one decision that  got made for me.  I laid there wondering
what to do for  so long that he got to the top of the stairs and came to my
room and turned the knob and came in.

I tried  to breathe slow and  regular, like somebody asleep.  Tried to keep
from getting too sparky. If it was somebody checking on me, they'd go away.

He didn't go away. And he walked soft, too, so as not to wake me up. He was
real scared. So scared that I finally knew there was no way he was there to
tuck me in and kiss me good night.

So  I tried  to twist him,  to send sparks  at him.  But I didn't  have any
sparks to  send! I mean I  wasn't mad or anything.  I'd never tried to kill
somebody on  purpose before, it was always because I  was already mad and I
just lost control and it happened. Now I'd been calming myself down so much
that  I couldn't  lose control.  I had no  sparks at  all to send,  just my
normal shining shadow, and he was right there and I didn't have a second to
lose so I rolled over. Toward him, which was maybe dumb, cause I might have
run into his knife, but I didn't know yet for sure that he had a knife. All
I was thinking was that I had to knock him down or push him or something.

The only person  I knocked down was me. I bumped him  and hit the floor. He
also cut my back  with the knife. Not much of a cut, he mostly just snagged
my shirt, but  if I was scared before, I was terrified  now cause I knew he
had a knife and  I knew even more that I didn't. I scrambled back away from
him. There was almost  no light from the window, it was like being in a big
closet, I  couldn't see  him, he couldn't  see me. Except of  course that I
could see  him, or at  least sense where he  was, and now I  was giving off
sparks like  crazy so unless he was weaker than I  thought, he could see me
too.

Well, he  was weaker than I  thought. He just kind  of drifted, and I could
hear him swishing the knife through the air in front of him. He had no idea
where I was.

And  all the  time I  was trying to  get madder  and madder, and  it wasn't
working. You can't get mad by trying. Maybe an actor can, but I'm no actor.
So I was scared  and sparking but I couldn't get that pulse to mess him up.
The more I thought about it, the calmer I got.

It's  like  you've  been  carrying around  a  machine  gun  all your  life,
accidently  blasting people  you didn't  really want  to hurt and  then the
first time you really want to lay into somebody, it jams.

So I stopped  trying to get mad. I just sat there  realizing I was going to
die, that after I  finally got myself under control so I didn't kill people
all the time anymore,  now that I didn't really want to commit suicide, now
I was going to get wasted. And they didn't even have the guts to come at me
openly. Sneaking  in the dark to  cut my throat while  I was asleep. And in
the meeting  where they decided to do it, my long  lost but loving mama and
daddy were right there. Heck, my dear sweet daddy was downstairs right now,
waiting for this assassin  to come down and tell him that I was dead. Would
he cry for me  then? Boo hoo my sweet little boy's all gone? Mick is in the
cold cold ground?

I  was mad. As  simple as that.  Stop thinking  about being mad,  and start
thinking about  the things that if  you think about them,  they'll make you
mad. I was so  sparky with fear that when I got mad, too, it was worse than
it ever  was before, built up  worse, you know. Only when  I let it fly, it
didn't go  for the  guy up there swishing  his knife back and  forth in the
dark.  That pulse  of  fire in  me went  right down  through the  floor and
straight to  dear old Dad. I  could hear him scream.  He felt it, just like
that. He felt it.  And so did I. Because that wasn't what  I meant to do. I
only met  him that day, but  he was my father,  and I did him  worse than I
ever did anybody before  in my life. I didn't plan to do it. You don't plan
to kill your father.

All of a sudden  I was blinded by light. For a second  I thought it was the
other kind of light, sparks, them retaliating, twisting me. Then I realized
it was  my eyes  being blinded, and it  was the overhead light  in the room
that  was on. The  guy with the  knife had  finally realized that  the only
reason not to have  the light on was so I wouldn't wake  up, but now that I
was awake  he might  as well see  what he's doing.  Lucky for  me the light
blinded him just as  much as it blinded me, or I'd have been poked before I
saw what hit  me. Instead I had time to scramble on  back to the far corner
of the room.

I  wasn't no  hero.  But I  was seriously  thinking  about running  at him,
attacking  a guy with  a knife. I  would have  been killed, but  I couldn't
think of anything else to do.

Then I thought of something else to do. I got the idea from the way I could
feel the electric current in the wires running from the lightswitch through
the  wall.  That  was  electricity,  and  the  lady in  Roanoke  called  my
sparkiness bio-electricity.  I ought  to be able  to do something  with it,
shouldn't I?

I thought  first that maybe  I could short-circuit something,  but I didn't
think I  had that much electricity  in me. I thought  of maybe tapping into
the  house current  to  add to  my own  juice, but  then I  remembered that
connecting up your body to house current is the same thing other folks call
electrocution.  I mean, maybe  I can tap  into house  wiring, but if  I was
wrong, I'd be real dead.

But I could still  do something. There was a table lamp right next to me. I
pulled off the shade and threw it at the guy, who was still standing by the
door, thinking  about what the scream downstairs  meant. Then I grabbed the
lamp and  turned it on, and then smashed the  light bulb on the nightstand.
Sparks. Then it was out.

I held  the lamp in my  hand, like a weapon,  so he'd think I  was going to
beat off his knife with the lamp. And if my plan was a bust, I guess that's
what  I would've done.  But while he  was looking  at me, getting  ready to
fight me knife against  lamp, I kind of let the jagged end of the lamp rest
on the  bedspread. And then I used my sparkiness,  the anger that was still
in  me. I  couldn't  fling it  at the  guy, or  well I  could have,  but it
would've been like the  bus driver, a six-month case of lung cancer. By the
time he  died of that, I'd  be six months worth  of dead from multiple stab
wounds to the neck and chest.

So I  let my sparkiness build  up and flow out along  my arm, out along the
lamp, like I was making my shadow grow. And it worked. The sparks just went
right on down the  lamp to the tip, and built up and  built up, and all the
time  I was  thinking about  how Papa  Lem was  trying to  kill me  cause I
thought his  daughter was  ugly and how he  made me kill my  daddy before I
even knew him half a day and that charge built up.

It built  up enough. Sparks started jumping  across inside the broken light
bulb, right there against the bedspread. Real sparks, the kind I could see,
not just feel. And in two seconds that bedspread was on fire. Then I yanked
the lamp so the cord shot right out of the wall, and I threw it at the guy,
and  while he  was dodging  I scooped up  the bedspread  and ran at  him. I
wasn't sure  whether I'd catch on  fire or he would,  but I figured held be
too panicked  and surprised to think of  stabbing me through the bedspread,
and sure  enough he didn't, he dropped the knife and  tried to beat off the
bedspread. Which  he didn't do too good, because I  was still pushing it at
him. Then he tried  to get through the door, but I kicked his ankle with my
shoe, and he fell down, stifl fighting off the blanket.

I got the knife and sliced right across the back of his thigh with it. Geez
it was sharp. Or maybe I was so mad and scared that I cut him stronger than
I ever  thought I  could, but it went  clear to the bone.  He was screaming
from the  fire and his leg  was gushing blood and  the fire was catching on
the wallpaper and it occurred to me that they couldn't chase me too good if
they was trying to put out a real dandy house fire.

It also  occurred to  me that I  couldn't run away  too good if  I was dead
inside that  house fire.  And thinking of  maybe dying in the  fire made me
realize that  the guy was burning  to death and I  did it to him, something
every bit  as terrible as cancer, and I didn't  care, because I'd killed so
many people that it  was nothing to me now, when a guy like that was trying
to  kill me,  I wasn't  even sorry  for his  pain, cause he  wasn't feeling
nothing  worse than  Old Peleg  felt, and  in fact  that even made  me feel
pretty good;  because it was like getting even  for Old Peleg's death, even
though it  was me killed them  both. I mean how could  I get even for Peleg
dying by killing somebody  else? Okay, maybe it makes sense in a way, cause
it was  their fault I was  in the orphanage instead  of growing up here. Or
maybe it made sense  because this guy deserved to die, and Peleg didn't, so
maybe somebody  who deserved  it had to die  a death as bad  as Peleg's, or
something. I don't know.  I sure as hell wasn't thinking about that then. I
just knew  that I  was hearing a guy  scream himself to death  and I didn't
even want to help him or even try to help him or nothing. I wasn't enjoying
it, either, I wasn't  thinking, Burn you sucker! or anything like that, but
I knew  right then that I  wasn't even human, I was  just a monster, like I
always  thought, like  in the  slasher movies.  This was straight  from the
slasher movies, somebody burning  up and screaming, and there's the monster
just standing there in the flames and he isn't burning.

And that's the truth. I wasn't burning. There was flames all around me, but
it kind of shied  back from me, because I was so full of sparks from hating
myself so bad that  it was like the flames couldn't get through to me. I've
thought about  that a lot since  then. I mean, even  that Swedish scientist
doesn't know  all about  this bio-electrical stuff.  Maybe when I  get real
sparky  it makes  it so  other stuff  can't hit  me. Maybe that's  how some
generals in  the Civil War used to ride around in  the open-- or maybe that
was that general in World War II, I can't remember-- and bullets didn't hit
them or anything. Maybe  if you're charged up enough, things just can't get
to you.  I don't know.  I just know that  by the time I  finally decided to
open the  door and actually opened  it, the whole room  was burning and the
door was burning and  I just opened it and walked through. Course now I got
a bandage  on my hand to prove that I couldn't  grab a hot doorknob without
hurting myself a little, but I shouldn't've been able to stay alive in that
room and I came out without even my hair singed.

I started  down the hall, not knowing who was still  in the house. I wasn't
used to being able  to see people by their sparkiness yet, so I didn't even
think of  checking, I just ran down the  stairs carrying that bloody knife.
But  it didn't matter.  They all ran  away before  I got there,  all except
Daddy. He was lying  in the middle of the floor in the living room, doubled
up, lying with his head in a pool of vomit and his butt in a pool of blood,
shaking like he was  dying of cold. I really done him. I really tore him up
inside.  I don't  think he even  saw me. But  he was  my daddy, and  even a
monster don't  leave his  daddy for the fire  to get him. So  I grabbed his
arms to try to pull him out.

I forgot  how sparky I was,  worse than ever. The  second I touched him the
sparkiness just  rushed out of me and all over him.  It never went that way
before, just  completely surrounded him like  he was a part  of me, like he
was completely drowning in my light. It wasn't what I meant to do at all. I
just forgot. I was  trying to save him and instead I gave  him a hit like I
never gave nobody before, and I couldn't stand it, I just screamed.

Then I dragged him  out. He was all limp, but even if I killed him, even if
I turned  him to jelly inside, he wasn't going to  burn, that's all I could
think of, that  and how I ought to walk back into  that house myself and up
the stairs and catch myself on fire and die.

But I didn't do  it, as you might guess. There was people yelling Fire! and
shouting Stay back! and I knew that I better get out of there. Daddy's body
was lying  on the grass  in front of the  house, and I took  off around the
back. I  thought maybe I heard some gunshots,  but it could've been popping
and cracking  of timbers in the  fire, I don't know.  I just ran around the
house and  along toward  the road, and if  there was people in  my way they
just got out of  my way, because even the most dimwitted inbred pukebrained
kid in that whole village would've seen my sparks, I was so hot.

I ran till the  asphalt ended and I was running on the dirt road. There was
clouds so  the moon was hardly  any light at all,  and I kept stumbling off
the road into the  weeds. I fell once and when I was getting up I could see
the fire behind me. The whole house was burning, and there was flames above
it in the trees.  Come to think of it there hadn't been all that much rain,
and  those trees  were dry.  A lot more  than one  house was going  to burn
tonight, I  figured, and for a  second I even thought  maybe nobody'd chase
me.

But that was about  as stupid an idea as I ever had. I mean, if they wanted
to kill me before because I said Papa Lem's girl was ugly, how do you think
they felt  about me now that  I burned down their  little hidden town? Once
they realized I was  gone, they'd be after me and I'd be lucky if they shot
me quick.

I even thought about  cutting off the road, dangerous or not, and hiding in
the woods. But I  decided to get as much distance as I could along the road
till I saw headlights.

Just when  I decided  that, the road  ended. Just bushes and  trees. I went
back, tried  to find the road. It must have turned  but I didn't know which
way. I was tripping  along like a blind man in the grass, trying to feel my
way  to  the ruts  of  the  dirt road,  and  of  course that's  when I  saw
headlights away  off toward the  burning houses-- there was  at least three
houses burning  now. They knew the  town was a total  loss by now, they was
probably just leaving enough  folks to get all the children out and away to
a safe  place, while the men came after me. It's  what I would've done, and
to hell  with cancer,  they knew I  couldn't stop them all  before they did
what they wanted to  me. And here I couldn't even find the road to get away
from them. By the  time their headlights got close enough to show the road,
it'd be too late to get away.

I was  about to  run back into  the woods when  all of  a sudden a  pair of
headlights went  on not twenty feet  away, and pointed right  at me. I damn
near wet my pants.  I thought, Mick Winger, you are a dead little boy right
this second.

And then  I heard  her calling to me.  "Get on over here,  Mick, you idiot,
don't stand  there in  the light, get on  over here." It was  the lady from
Roanoke.  I still  couldn't see  her cause  of the  lights, but I  knew her
voice, and I took off. The road didn't end, it just turned a little and she
was parked right where  the dirt road met up sideways with a gravel road. I
got around to the  door of the car she was driving, or truck or whatever it
was--  a four-wheel-drive Blazer  maybe, I  know it had  a four-wheel-drive
shift lever in it-- anyway the door was locked and she was yelling at me to
get in and I was yelling back that it was locked until finally she unlocked
it and I climbed in. She backed up so fast and swung around onto the gravel
in a spin  that near threw me right out the door,  since I hadn't closed it
yet. Then  she took off so fast going  forward, spitting gravel behind her,
that the door closed itself.

"Fasten your seat belt," she says to me.

"Did you follow me here?" I says.

"No, I  just happened to be  here picnicking," she says.  "Fasten your damn
seat belt."

I did, but  then I turned around in my seat and  looked out the back. There
was five  or six  sets of headlights, making  the job to get  from the dirt
road onto the gravel road. We didn't have more than a mile on them.

"We've been looking for this place for years," she says. "We thought it was
in Rockingham County, that's how far off we were."

"Where is it, then?" I says.

"Alamance County," she says.

And then  I says, "I don't  give a damn what county it  is! I killed my own
daddy back there!"

And she  says to me,  "Don't get mad now,  don't get mad at  me, I'm sorry,
just calm down."  That was all she could think of, how  I might get mad and
lose control and kill  her, and I don't blame her, cause it was the hardest
thing I  ever did, keeping myself from busting out  right there in the car,
and it would've killed her, too. The pain in my hand was starting to get to
me, too,  from where  I grabbed the  doorknob. It was just  building up and
building up.

She was driving a lot faster than the headlights reached. We'd be going way
too fast  for a curve  before she even saw  it, and then she'd  slam on the
brakes and  we'd skid and sometimes I couldn't  believe we didn't just roll
over and crash. But she always got out of it.

I couldn't face back  anymore. I just sat there with my eyes closed, trying
to get calm,  and then I'd remember my daddy who I  didn't even like but he
was my  daddy lying there in his blood and his  puke, and I'd remember that
guy who burned to  death up in my room and even though I didn't care at the
time, I sure cared now, I was so angry and scared and I hated myself so bad
I couldn't hold it  in, only I also couldn't let it out, and I kept wishing
I could  just die.  Then I realized  that the guys following  us were close
enough that  I could feel them.  Or no it wasn't  that they was close. They
was just  so mad  that I could  see their sparks flying  like never before.
Well as long as  I could see them I could let fly, couldn't I? I just flung
out  toward  them.  I  don't know  if  I  hit  them.  I  don't  know if  my
bio-electricity is something I  can throw like that or what. But at least I
shucked it off myself, and I didn't mess up the lady who was driving.

When  we hit  asphalt  again, I  found out  that I  didn't know  what crazy
driving was  before. She  peeled out and now  she began to look  at a curve
ahead and then switch  off the headlights until she was halfway through the
curve, it  was the craziest thing I ever saw, but  it also made sense. They
had to be following  our lights, and when our lights went out they wouldn't
know  where we  was for  a minute.  They also  wouldn't know that  the road
curved ahead, and they  might even crash up or at least they'd have to slow
down.  Of course,  we  had a  real good  chance of  ending up  eating trees
ourselves, but she drove like she knew what she was doing.

We  came to  a  straight section  with a  crossroads about  a mile  up. She
switched off  the lights again, and I thought maybe  she was going to turn,
but she didn't, just  went on and on and on, straight into the pitch black.
Now, that  straight section  was long, but  it didn't go on  forever, and I
don't  care how  good a  driver you are,  you can't  keep track of  how far
you've  gone in  the dark.  just when  I thought  for sure we'd  smash into
something, she  let off the gas and reached her hand  out the window with a
flashlight. We  was still going pretty fast,  but the flashlight was enough
to make a reflector  up ahead flash back at us, so she knew where the curve
was,  and it was  farther off than  I thought.  She whipped us  around that
curve  and then  around another,  using just  a couple  of blinks  from the
flashlight, before she switched on her headlights again.

I looked behind us to see if I could see anybody. "You lost them!" I says.

"Maybe," she says. "You tell me."

So I  tried to feel where  they might be, and  sure enough, they was sparky
enough that  I could just barely tell where they  was, away back. Split up,
smeared out. "They're going every which way," I says.

"So we  lost a few of  them," she says. "They aren't  going to give up, you
know."

"I know," I says.

"You're the hottest thing going," she says.

"And you're a daughter of Esau," I says.

"Like hell I am," she says. "I'm a great-great-great-granddaughter of Jacob
Yow, who happened to  be bio-electrically talented. Like if you're tall and
athletic, you can play basketball. That's all it is, just a natural talent.
Only he went crazy and started inbreeding his whole family, and they've got
these stupid  ideas about being the chosen of God  and all the time they're
just murderers."

"Tell me about it," I says.

"You can't  help it," she says. "You didn't have  anybody to teach you. I'm
not blaming you."

But I was blaming me.

She says, "Ignorant, that's  what they are. Well, my grandpa didn't want to
just  keep reading  the  Bible and  killing  any revenuers  or sheriffs  or
whatever who  gave us trouble. He  wanted to find out  what we are. He also
didn't want  to marry  the slut they  picked out for him  because he wasn't
particularly dusty. So he left. They hunted him down and tried to kill him,
but he  got away, and he  married. And he also  studied and became a doctor
and his  kids grew up  knowing that they had  to find out what  it is, this
power. It's like the old stories of witches, women who get mad and suddenly
your  cows start  dying. Maybe they  didn't even  know they were  doing it.
Summonings and love spells  and come-hithers, everybody can do it a little,
just like everybody can  throw a ball and sometimes make a basket, but some
people can do it better than others. And Papa Lem's people, they do it best
of all,  better and better, because  they're breeding for it.  We've got to
stop  them, don't  you see?  We've got  to keep  them from learning  how to
control it.  Because now we know  more about it. It's  all tied up with the
way  the human  body  heals itself.  In  Sweden they've  been changing  the
currents around  to heal tumors.  Cancer. The opposite of  what you've been
doing, but  it's the same principle.  Do you know what  that means? If they
could control it, Lem's  people could be healers, not killers. Maybe all it
takes is to do it with love, not anger."

"Did you kill them little girls in orphanages with love?" I says.

And  she just  drives, she doesn't  say a  thing, just drives.  "Damn," she
says, "it's raining."

The road was slick in two seconds. She slowed way down. It came down harder
and harder.  I looked behind us and there  was headlights back there again.
Way back, but I could still see them. "They're on us again," I says.

"I can't go any faster in the rain," she says.

"It's raining on them too," I says.

"Not with my luck."

And I says, "It'll put the fire out. Back where they live."

And she  says, "It doesn't matter.  They'll move. They know  we found them,
because we picked you up. So they'll move."

I apologized for causing trouble, and she says, "We couldn't let you die in
there. I had to go there and save you if I could."

"Why?" I ask her. "Why not let me die?"

"Let me put it another way," she says. "If you decided to stay with them, I
had to go in there and kill you."

And  I says  to  her, "You're  the queen  of compassion,  you know?"  And I
thought about  it a little. "You're just like they  are, you know?" I says.
"You wanted to get pregnant just like they did. You wanted to breed me like
a stud horse."

"If I  wanted to breed  you," she says, "I  would have done it  on the hill
this morning. Yesterday morning. You would've done it. And I should've made
you, because  if you went with  them, our only hope was  to have a child of
yours that we could  raise to be a decent person. Only it turned out you're
a decent  person, so we didn't  have to kill you. Now  we can study you and
learn about  this from the strongest living  example of the phenomenon" --I
don't know  how to  pronounce that, but you  know what I mean.  Or what she
meant, anyway.

And I  says to her, "Maybe  I don't want you to study  me, did you think of
that?"

And she says to  me, "Maybe what you want don't amount to a goldfish fart."
Or anyway that's what she meant.

That's about  when they started shooting  at us. Rain or  no rain, they was
pushing it  so they got close enough to shoot, and  they wasn't half bad at
it, seeing  as the first bullet  we knew about went  right through the back
window and  in between us and smacked a hole  in the windshield. Which made
all kinds  of cracks in the glass so she couldn't  see, which made her slow
down more, which meant they was even closer.

Just then  we whipped around a corner and our headlights  lit up a bunch of
guys  getting  out  of a  car  with  guns in  their  hands,  and she  says,
"Finally." So I figured they was some of her people, there to take the heat
off. But  at that  same second Lem's  people must have  shot out  a tire or
maybe  she just  got a  little careless  for a  second cause after  all she
couldn't see  too good through the windshield,  but anyway she lost control
and we  skidded and flipped over, rolled over it  felt like five times, all
in slow  motion, rolling and  rolling, the doors popping  open and breaking
off, the  windshield cracking and crumbling away, and  there we hung in our
seat belts,  not talking or nothing, except maybe I was  saying 0 my God or
something and then we smacked into something and just stopped, which jerked
us around inside the car and then it was all over.

I heard water rushing.  A stream, I thought. We can wash up. Only it wasn't
a stream,  it was  the gasoline pouring out  of the tank. And  then I heard
gunshots from back up  by the road. I didn't know who was fighting who, but
if the wrong  guys won they'd just love to catch us  in a nice hot gasoline
fire. Getting out wasn't  going to be all that hard. The doors were gone so
we didn't have to climb out a window or anything.

We were  leaned over on the  left side, so her  door was mashed against the
ground. I says  to her, "We got to climb out my  door." I had brains enough
to hook one arm up over the lip of the car before I unbuckled my seat belt,
and then  I hoisted myself out  and stayed perched up  there on the side of
the car, up in the air, so I could reach down and help her out.

Only  she wasn't climbing  out. I yelled  at her  and she didn't  answer. I
thought for a second she was dead, but then I saw that her sparks was still
there.  Funny, how  I never saw  she had  any sparkiness before,  because I
didn't know  to look for it,  but now, even though it  was dim, I could see
it. Only  it wasn't so dim,  it was real busy, like  she was trying to heal
herself.  The gurgling  was  still going  on, and  everything  smelled like
gasoline. There  was still shooting going on. And  even if nobody came down
to start us  on fire on purpose, I saw enough car  crashes at the movies to
know you didn't need  a match to start a car on fire. I sure didn't want to
be near  the car  if it caught,  and I sure  didn't want  her in it.  But I
couldn't  see how  to climb  down in  and pull  her out.  I mean I'm  not a
weakling but I'm not Mr. Universe either.

It felt like I sat there for a whole minute before I realized I didn't have
to pull  her out my side  of the car, I could pull  her out the front cause
the  whole windshield  was missing  and the  roof: was  only mashed  down a
little, cause there was a rollbar in the car-- that was real smart, putting
a rollbar  in. I jumped off  the car. It wasn't  raining right here, but it
had rained,  so it was slippery and wet. Or maybe  it was slippery from the
gasoline, I  don't know. I  got around the front  of the car and  up to the
windshield,  and I  scraped  the bits  of glass  off with  my shoe.  Then I
crawled partway in and reached under her and undid her seat belt, and tried
to pull her  out, but her legs was hung up under  the steering wheel and it
took forever, it was terrible, and all the time I kept listening for her to
breathe,  and she  didn't breathe, and  so I  kept getting more  seared and
frustrated  and all  I  was thinking  about was  how she  had to  live, she
couldn't be dead, she  just got through saving my life and now she was dead
and she couldn't be and I was going to get her out of the car even if I had
to break  her legs to do  it, only I didn't have to  break her legs and she
finally slid  out and I dragged  her away from the  car. It didn't catch on
fire, but I couldn't know it wasn't going to.

And anyway all I  cared about then was her, not breathing, lying there limp
on the  grass with her neck  all floppy and I was  holding on to her crying
and angry and scared and I had us both covered with sparks, like we was the
same person, just completely  covered, and I was crying and saying, Live! I
couldn't even call her by name or nothing because I didn't know her name. I
just  know I  was shaking  like I  had the  chills and  so was and  she was
breathing now  and whimpering ike somebody just stepped  on a puppy and the
sparks just  kept flowing  around us both  and I felt  like somebody sucked
everything out of me,  like I was a wet towel and somebody wrung me out and
flipped me into a corner, and then I don't remember until I woke up here.

*What did it feel like? What you did to her?*

It felt like  when I covered her with light, it was  like I was taking over
doing  what her own  body should've done,  it was  like I was  healing her.
Maybe I got that idea because she said something about healing when she was
driving the car, but  she wasn't breathing when I dragged her out, and then
she was  breathing. So I want  to know if I healed  her. Because if she got
healed when  I covered her with  my own light, then  maybe I didn't kill my
daddy either, because it was kind of like that, I think it was kind of like
that, what happened when I dragged him out of the house.

I been talking a  long time now, and you still told me nothing. Even if you
think I'm just a killer and you want me dead, you can tell me about her. Is
she alive?

*Yes.*

Well then how  come I can't see her? How come she  isn't here with the rest
of you?

*She had some surgery. It takes time to heal.*

But did  I help  her? Or did  I twist her? You  got to tell me.  Cause if I
didn't help her then  I hope I fail your test and you kill me cause I can't
think  of a  good reason  why I  should be alive  if all  I can do  is kill
people.

*You helped her, Mick.  That last bullet caught her in the head. That's why
she crashed.*

But she wasn't bleeding!

*It was  dark, Mick. You couldn't see. You had her  blood all over you. But
it doesn't matter now. We have the bullet out. As far as we can tell, there
was no brain damage. There should have been. She should have been dead.*

So I did help her.

*Yes. But  we don't know how.  All kinds of stories,  you know, about faith
healing, that  sort of  thing. Laying on  of hands. Maybe it's  the kind of
thing you  did, merging the bio-magnetic field. A  lot of things don't make
any  sense  yet.  There's  no way  we  can  see  that  the  tiny amount  of
electricity  in  a human  bio-electric  system could  influence somebody  a
hundred miles  off, but they summoned  you, and you came.  We need to study
you,  Mick. We've  never had anybody  as powerful  as you. Tell  the truth,
maybe there's never been anybody like you. Or maybe all the healings in the
New Testament-- *

I don't  want to hear about  no testaments. Papa Lem  gave me about all the
testaments I ever need to hear about.

*Will you help us, Mick?*

Help you how?

*Let us study you.*

Go ahead and study.

*Maybe it won't be enough just to study how you heal people.*

I'm not going  to kill nobody for you. If you try  to make me kill somebody
I'll kill you  first till you have to kill me just  to save your own lives,
do you understand me?

*Calm down,  Mick. Don't get angry.  There's plenty of time  to think about
things. Actually  we're glad  that you don't  want to kill  anybody. If you
enjoyed  it, or  even if  you hadn't been  able to  control it and  kept on
indiscriminately killing anyone who enraged you, you wouldn't have lived to
be  seventeen. Because  yes, we're  scientists, or  at least  we're finally
learning enough  that we can start being  scientists. But first we're human
beings, and  we're in  the middle of a  war, and children like  you are the
weapons. If  they ever  got someone like  you to stay with  them, work with
them, you could seek  us out and destroy us. That's what they wanted you to
do.*

That's right,  that's one thing Papa Lem said, I  don't know if I mentioned
it before,  but he said that  the children of Israel  were supposed to kill
every man, woman, and  child in Canaan, cause idolaters had to make way for
the children of God.

*Well, you  see, that's why our branch of the  family left. We didn't think
it was such a terrific idea, wiping out the entire human race and replacing
it with  a bunch of murderous, incestuous  religious fanatics. For the last
twenty years, we've been  able to keep them from getting somebody like you,
because we've  murdered the children that were so  powerful they had to put
them outside to be reared by others.*

Except me.

*lt's a  war. We  didn't like killing  children. But it's  like bombing the
place where  your enemies are building a secret weapon.  The lives of a few
children--  no, that's  a  lie. It  nearly  split us  apart ourselves,  the
arguments over  that. Letting  you live-- it  was a terrible  risk. I voted
against it  every time. And I don't apologize for  that, Mick. Now that you
know what  they are, and you  chose to leave, I'm glad  I lost. But so many
things could have gone wrong.*

They won't  put any more babies out to  orphanages now, though. They're not
that dumb.

*But now we have  you. Maybe we can learn how to block what they do. Or how
to heal the people  they attack. Or how to identify sparkiness, as you call
it,  from a  distance.  All kinds  of  possibilities. But  sometime in  the
future, Mick, you may be the only weapon we have. Do you understand that?*

I don't want to.

*I know.*

You wanted to kill me?

*I wanted to protect people from you. It was safest. Mick, I really am glad
it worked out this way.*

I don't know whether to believe you, Mr. Kaiser. You're such a good liar. I
thought you were  so nice to me all that time because  you were just a nice
guy.

*Oh, he is, Mick. He's a nice guy. Also a damn fine liar. We kind of needed
both those attributes in the person we had looking out for you.*

Well, anyway, that's over with.

*What's over with?*

Killing me. Isn't it?

*That's up to you,  Mick. If you ever start getting crazy on us, or killing
people that aren't part of this war of ours-- *

I won't do that!

*But if you did, Mick. It's never too late to kill you.*

Can I see her?

*See who?*

The lady from Roanoke! Isn't it about time you told me her name?

*Come on. She can tell you herself.*

St. Amy's Tale

Mother could kill with her hands. Father could fly. These are miracles. But
they were  not miracles then. Mother  Elouise taught me that  there were no
miracles then.

I am the child of Wreckers, born while the angel was in them. This is why I
am called  Saint Amy, though I  perceive nothing in me  that should make me
holier than  any other  old woman. Yet  Mother Elouise denied  the angel in
her, too, and it was no less there.

Sift your  fingers through the soil,  all you who read  my words. Take your
spades of iron and  your picks of stone. Dig deep. You will find no ancient
works of  man hidden there. For the Wreckers  passed through the world, and
all the vanity was  consumed in fire; all the pride broke in pieces when it
was smitten by God's shining hand.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elouise  leaned on  the rim of  the computer  keyboard. All around  her the
machinery  was  alive, the  screens  displaying  information. Elouise  felt
nothing but weariness. She  was leaning because, for a moment, she had felt
a  frightening  vertigo.  As  if  the  world underneath  the  airplane  had
dissolved and slipped away into a rapidly receding star and she would never
be able to land.

True enough,  she thought. I'll never  be able to land,  not in the world I
knew.

"Getting sentimental about the old computers?"

Elouise, startled,  turned in her chair and  faced her husband, Charlie. At
that  moment  the airplane  lurched,  but  like sailors  accustomed to  the
shifting of  the sea,  they adjusted unconsciously  and did not  notice the
imbalance.

"Is it noon already?" she asked.

"It's  the mortal  equivalent  of noon.  I'm too  tired  to fly  this thing
anymore, and it's a good thing Bill's at the controls."

"Hungry?"

Charlie shook his head. "But Amy probably is," he said.

"Voyeur," said Elouise.

Charlie  liked  to watch  Elouise  nurse  their daughter.  But despite  her
accusation, Elouise knew there  was nothing sexual in it. Charlie liked the
idea  of  Elouise  being  Amy's mother.  He  liked  the  way Amy's  sucking
resembled the  sucking of a calf  or a lamb or a  puppy. He had said, "It's
the best  thing we  kept from the  animals. The best thing  we didn't throw
away."

"Better than sex?" Elouise had asked. And Charlie had only smiled.

Amy  was playing  with a  rag doll  in the  only large  clear space  in the
airplane, near the exit  door. "Mommy Mommy Mamommy Mommy-o," Amy said. The
child stood and reached  to be picked up. Then she saw Charlie. "Daddy Addy
Addy."

"Hi," Charlie said.

"Hi,"  Amy  answered. "Ha-ee."  She  had  only just  learned  to close  the
diphthong, and she exaggerated it. Amy played with the buttons on Elouise's
shirt, trying to undo them.

"Greedy," Elouise said, laughing.

Charlie unbuttoned  the shirt for her,  and Amy seized on  the nipple after
only one  false grab. She  sucked noisily, tapping her  hand gently against
Elouise's breast as she ate.

"I'm  glad we're  so near  finished," Elouise  said. "She's  too old  to be
nursing now."

"That's right. Throw the little bird out of the nest."

"Go to bed," Elouise said.

Amy recognized the phrase. She pulled away. "La-lo," she said.

"That's right. Daddy's going to sleep," Elouise said.

Elouise watched  as Charlie stripped off most of  his clothing and lay down
on the  pad. He smiled once, then turned  over, and was immediately asleep.
He was in tune  with his body. Elouise knew that he would awaken in exactly
six hours, when it was time for him to take the controls again.

Amy's sucking  was a subtle pleasure now, though  it had been agonizing the
first few months, and  painful again when Amy's first teeth had come in and
she had  learned to  her delight that  by mpping she could  make her mother
scream. But better to  nurse her than ever have her eat the predigested pap
that was served as  food on the airplane. Elouise thought wryly that it was
even worse  than the microwaved veal cordon bleu  that they used to inflict
on  commercial passengers. Only  eight years  ago. And they  had calibrated
their fuel  so exactly that when they took the last  draft of fuel from the
last of their storage tanks, the tank registered empty; they would burn the
last of the processed petroleum, instead of putting it back into the earth.
All their caches were  gone now, and they would be at the tender mercies of
the world that they themselves had created.

Still, there  was work to do; the final work,  in the final checks. Elouise
held Amy  with one arm  while she used her  free hand slowly to  key in the
last  program that  her  role as  commander  required her  to use.  Elouise
Private, she  typed. Teacher  teacher I declare I  see someone's underwear,
she typed.  On the screen appeared the warning she  had put there: "You may
think  you're lucky  finding this  program, but  unless you know  the magic
words, an  alarm is  going to go off  all over this airplane  and you'll be
had. No way out of it, sucker. Love, Elouise."

Elouise, of  course, knew the  magic words. Einstein sucks,  she typed. The
screen went blank, and the alarm did not go off.

Malfunction? she queried. "None," answered the computer.

Tamper? she queried, and the computer answered, "None."

Nonreport? she queried, and the computer flashed, "AFscanP7bb55."

Elouise had  not really  been dozing. But  still she was  startled, and she
lurched forward, disturbing Amy,  who really had fallen asleep. "No no no,"
said  Amy,  and Elouise  forced  herself  to be  patient;  she soothed  her
daughter back  to sleep before  pursuing whatever it was  that her guardian
program  had caught.  Whatever it  was? Oh,  she knew  what it was.  It was
treachery. The  one thing she had  been sure her group,  her airplane would
never have. Other groups  of Rectifiers-- wreckers, they called themselves,
having adopted  their enemies' name  for them-- other groups  had had their
spies or their fainthearts, but not Bill or Heather or Ugly-Bugly.

Specify, she typed.

The computer was specific.

Over northern Virginia, as  the airplane followed its careful route to find
and destroy  everything made  of metal, glass, and  plastic; somewhere over
northern Virginia,  the airplane's path bent slightly  to the south, and on
the return,  at the  same place, the  airplane's path bent  slightly to the
north, so  that a strip of northern Virginia two  kilometers long and a few
dozen meters wide could contain some nonbiodegradable artifact, hidden from
the airplane, and if  Elouise had not queried this program, she would never
have known it.

But she  should have known it. When the  plane's course bent, alarms should
have sounded.  Someone had penetrated  the first line of  defense. But Bill
could not have done  that, nor could Heather, really-- they didn't have the
sophistication to break up a bubble program. Ugly-Bugly?

She knew it wasn't faithful old Ugly-Bugly. No, not her.

The  computer  voluntarily  flashed,  "Override M577b,  commandmo4,  intwis
CtTttT."  It  was an  apology.  Someone  aboard ship  had  found the  alarm
override program  and the overrides for the  alarm overrides. Not my fault,
the computer was saying.

Elouise hesitated for a moment. She looked down at her daughter and moved a
curl of red hair  away from Amy's eye. Elouise's hand trembled. But she was
a woman of ice, yes, all frozen where compassion made other women warm. She
prided  herself on  that, on having  frozen the  last warm places  in her--
frozen so  goddamn rigid that it  was only a moment's  hesitation. And then
she  reached  out  and  asked for  the  access  code  used  to perform  the
treachery, asked for the name of the traitor.

The computer was even  less compassionate than Elouise. It hesitated not at
all.

The computer  did not underline; the  letters on the screen  were no larger
than normal.  Yet Elouise felt the words as a  shout, and she answered them
silently with a scream.

Charles Evan Hardy, b24ag61-richlandWA.

It was Charlie who  was the traitor-- Charlie, her sweet, soft, hard-bodied
husband, Charlie who secretly was trying to undo the end of the world.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

God has destroyed the  world before. Once in a flood, when Noah rode it out
in the  Ark. And once the  tower of the world's  pride was destroyed in the
confusion of tongues. The other times, if there were any other times, those
times are all forgotten.

The world  will probably  be destroyed again,  unless we repent.  And don't
think you can hide  from the angels. They start out as ordinary people, and
you never  know which ones. Suddenly  God puts the power  of destruction in
their  hands,  and  they  destroy.  And  just  as suddenly,  when  all  the
destruction is  done, the  angel leaves them, and  they're ordinary people.
Just my mother and my father.

I can't remember Father Charlie's face. I was too young.

Mother Elouise  told me often about Father Charlie. He  was born far to the
west in a land where water only comes to the crops in ditches, almost never
from  the sky.  It  was a  land unblessed  by  God. Men  lived  there, they
believed, only  by the strength of their own  hands. Men made their ditches
and  forgot  about  God  and became  scientists.  Father  Charlie became  a
scientist. He  worked on tiny  animals, breaking their heart  of hearts and
combining it in new ways. Hearts were broken too often where he worked, and
one of the little animals escaped and killed people until they lay in great
heaps like fish in the ship's hold.

But this was not the destruction of the world.

Oh,  they were giants  in those days,  and they  forgot the Lord,  but when
their  people lay  in  piles of  moldering flesh  and brittling  bone, they
remembered they were weak.

Mother  Elouise said, "Charlie  came weeping."  This is how  Father Charlie
became an  angel. He  saw what the  giants had done, by  thinking they were
greater than  God. At  first he sinned  in his grief.  Once he  cut his own
throat. They  put Mother Elouise's blood  in him to save  his life. This is
how  they met: in  the forest where  he had  gone to die  privately, Father
Charlie woke  up from  a sleep he thought  would be forever to  see a woman
lying next to him  in the tent and a doctor bending over them both. When he
saw that this woman gave her blood to him whole and unstintingly, he forgot
his wish  to die.  He loved her  forever. Mother Elouise said  he loved her
right up to the day she killed him.

When they  were finished, they had a sort of ceremony,  a sort of party. "A
benediction," said Bill, solemnly sipping at the gin. "Amen and amen."

"My shift,"  Charlie said, stepping into the  cockpit. Then he noticed that
everyone was  there and  that they were  drinking the last of  the gin, the
bottle that  had been  saved for the  end. "Well, happy  us," Charlie said,
smiling.

Bill got up from  the controls of the 787. "Any preferences on where we set
down?" he asked. Charlie took his place.

The  others looked  at  one another.  Ugly-Bugly shrugged.  "God,  who ever
thought about it?"

"Come on, we're all futurists," Heather said. "You must know where you want
to live."

"Two  thousand years  from now," Ugly-Bugly  said. "I  want to live  in the
world the way it'll be two thousand years from now."

"Ugly-Bugly opts  for resurrection,"  Bill said. "I, however,  long for the
bosom of Abraham."

"Virginia," said Elouise. They turned to face her. Heather laughed.

"Resurrection," Bill intoned, "the bosom of Abraham, and Virginia. You have
no poetry, Elouise."

"I've written  down the coordinates of  the place where we  are supposed to
land," Elouise said. She handed them to Charlie. He did not avoid her gaze.
She watched  him read  the paper. He  showed no sign of  recognition. For a
moment she hoped that  it had all been a mistake, but no. She would not let
herself be misled by her desires.

"Why Virginia?" Heather asked.

Charlie looked up. "It's central."

"It's east coast," Heather said.

"It's central in the high survival area. There isn't much of a living to be
had in the western  mountains or on the plains. It's not so far south as to
be in  hunter-gatherer country and not  so far north as  to be unsurvivable
for a high proportion of the people. Barring a hard winter."

"All very good reasons," Elouise said. "Fly us there, Charlie."

Did  his hands  tremble as  he touched  the controls? Elouise  watched very
carefully, but he did not tremble. Indeed, he was the only one who did not.
Ugly-Bugly  suddenly began  to  cry, tears  coming  from her  good eye  and
streaming down  her good cheek. Thank God she doesn't  cry out of the other
side, Elouise  thought; then she was angry at  herself, for she had thought
Ugly-Bugly's deformed face didn't  bother her anymore. Elouise was angry at
herself, but  it only made her cold inside,  determined that there would be
no failure. Her mission  would be complete. No allowances made for personal
cost.

Elouise suddenly started out of her contemplative mood to find that the two
other  women  had left  the  cockpit--  their sleep  shift,  though it  was
doubtful they would sleep.  Charlie silently flew the plane, while Bill sat
in the  copilot's seat, pouring himself  the last drop from  the bottle. He
was looking at Elouise.

"Cheers," Elouise said to him.

He smiled sadly back  at her. "Amen," he said. Then he leaned back and sang
softly:

Praise God,  from whom  all blessings flow.  Praise him, ye  creatures here
below. Praise  him, who slew the wicked host.  Praise Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost.

Then he reached for Elouise's hand. She was surprised, but let him take it.
He bent  to her  and kissed her  palm tenderly. "For  many have entertained
angels unaware," he said to her.

A few moments later  he was asleep. Charlie and Elouise sat in silence. The
plane flew on south as darkness overtook them from the east. At first their
silence  was  almost  affectionate.  But as  Elouise  sat  and sat,  saying
nothing, she  felt the  silence grow cold  and terrible, and  for the first
time she  realized that  when the airplane  landed, Charlie would  be her--
Charlie, who had been  half her life for these last few years, whom she had
never lied to and who had never lied to her-- would be her enemy.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have watched the  little children do a dance called Charlie-El. They sing
a little song to it, and if I remember the words, it goes like this:

I am made of  bones and glass. Let me pass, let me pass. I am made of brick
and steel.  Take my heel, take my heel. I  was killed just yesterday. Kneel
and pray, kneel and pray. Dig a hole where I can sleep. Dig it deep, dig it
deep. Will I go to heaven or hell? Charlie-El. Charlie-El.

I think they are already nonsense words to the children. But the poem first
got passed  word of mouth around Richmond when I  was little, and living in
Father Michael's house. The  children do not try to answer their song. They
just sing it and do a very clever little dance while they sing. They always
end the  song with all the  children falling down on  the ground, laughing.
That is the best way for the song to end.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Charlie brought  the airplane straight  down into a field,  great hot winds
pushing against the ground as if to shove it back from the plane. The field
caught fire,  but when  the plane had  settled upon its  three wheels, foam
streaked out from the belly of the machine and overtook the flames. Elouise
watched from the cockpit,  thinking, Wherever the foam has touched, nothing
will grow for years. It seemed symmetrical to her. Even in the last moments
of the last machine,  it must poison the earth. Elouise held Amy on her lap
and  thought of trying  to explain it  to the  child. But Elouise  knew Amy
would not understand or remember.

"Last  one  dressed  is  a  sissy-wissy,"  said Ugly-Bugly  in  her  husky,
ancient-sounding  voice. They had  dressed and  undressed in front  of each
other for  years now, but  today as the old  plastic-polluted clothing came
off and the homespun went on, they felt and acted like school kids on their
first day in coed  gym. Amy caught the spirit of it and kept yelling at the
top of her lungs.  No one thought to quiet her. There was no need. This was
a celebration.

But Elouise, long accustomed to self-examination, forced herself to realize
that  there was a  strain to her  frolicking. She  did not believe  it, not
really. Today  was not  a happy day, and  it was not just  from knowing the
confrontation that lay ahead.  There was something so final about the death
of the last of  the engines of mankind. Surely something could be-- but she
forced the  thought from her, forced  the coldness in her  to overtake that
sentiment. Surely, she could  not be seduced by the beauty of the airplane.
Surely  she  must remember  that  it was  not  the machines  but what  they
inevitably did to mankind that was evil.

They looked and felt a little awkward, almost silly, as they left the plane
and stood  around in the blackened field. They had  not yet lost their feel
for stylish clothing, and  the homespun was so lumpy and awkward and rough.
It didn't look right on any of them.

Amy clung  to her  doll, awed by the  strange scenery. In her  life she had
been out  of the airplane only  once, and that was  when she was an infant.
She watched as the trees moved unpredictably. She winced at the wind in her
eyes. She  touched her  cheek, where her  hair moved back and  forth in the
breeze, and  hunted through her vocabulary  for a word to  name the strange
invisible touch on her skin. "Mommy," she said. "Uh! Uh! Uh!"

Elouise understood.  "Wind," she said.  The sounds were still  too hard for
Amy, and the child  did not attempt to say the word. Wind, thought Elouise,
and immediately  thought of Charlie. Her best memory  of Charlie was in the
wind.  It  was during  his  death-wish  time, not  long  after his  suicide
attempt. He had insisted on climbing a mountain, and she knew that he meant
to fall. So she  had climbed with him, even though there was a storm coming
up. Charlie was angry  all the way. She remembered a terrible hour clinging
to the face of a cliff, held only by small bits of metal forced into cracks
in the  rock She had insisted  on remaining tied to  Charlie. "If one of us
fell, it would only drag the other down, too," he kept saymg. "I know," she
kept answering.  And so Charlie had not fallen, and  they made love for the
first time In a  shallow cave, with the wind howling outside and occasional
sprays of rain coming in to dampen them. They refused to be dampened. Wind.
Damn.

And Elouise  felt herself  go cold and  unemotional, and they  stood on the
edge of  the field  in the shade of  the first trees. Elouise  had left the
Rectifier  near  the plane,  set  on  360 degrees.  In  a  few minutes  the
Rectifier would go off,  and they had to watch, to witness the end of their
work.

Suddenly Bill shouted, laughed, held up his wrist. "My watch!" he cried.

"Hurry," Charlie said. "There's time."

Bill unbuckled his watch and ran toward the Rectifier. He tossed the watch.
It landed  within a few meters of the small  machine. Then Bill returned to
the group, jogging and  shaking his head. "Jesus, what a moron! Three years
wiping out everything east  of the Mississippi, and I almost save a digital
chronograph."

"Dixie Instniments?" Heather asked.

"Yeah."

"That's not  high technology,"  she said, and  they all laughed.  Then they
fell silent,  and Elouise wondered whether they  were all thinking the same
thing: that  jokes about brand names would be  dead within a generation, if
they were not already  dead. They watched the Rectifier in silence, waiting
for the timer to finish its delay. Suddenly there was a shining in the air,
a dazzling  not-light that made them squint. They  had seen this many times
before, from  the air and from the ground, but this  was the last time, and
so they saw it as if it were the first.

The airplane  corroded as if a thousand years  were passing in seconds. But
it  wasn't  a true  corrosion.  There  was no  rust--  only dissolution  as
molecules separated  and seeped down into  the loosened earth. Glass became
sand; plastic corrupted to oil; the metal also drifted down into the ground
and came  to rest in a vein at the bottom  of the Rectifier field. Whatever
else the metal might look like to a future geologist, it wouldn't look like
an artifact.  It would look like iron. And with  so many similar pockets of
iron and  copper and  aluminum and tin  spread all over  the once-civilized
world,  it  was not  likely  that  they would  suspect human  interference.
Elouise  was  amused,  thinking  of the  treatises  that  would someday  be
written, about  the two states of  workable metals-- the ore  state and the
pure-metal vein. She hoped it would retard their progress a little.

The  airplane shivered  into nothing,  and the  Rectifier also died  in the
field. A few minutes after the Rectifier disappeared, the field also faded.

"Amen and amen," said Bill, maudlin again. "All clean now."

Elouise only smiled. She  said nothing of the other Rectifier, which was in
her knapsack. Let the others think all the work was done.

Amy poked her finger  in Charlie's eye. Charlie swore and set her down. Amy
started to  cry, and Charlie knelt  by her and hugged  her. Amy's arms went
tightly around his neck. "Give Daddy a kiss," Elouise said.

"Well, time  to go," Ugly-Bugly's voice rasped. "Why  the hell did you pick
this particular spot?"

Elouise cocked her head. "Ask Charlie."

Charlie  flushed. Elouise  watched  him grimly.  "Elouise and  I  once came
here,"  he  said. "Before  Rectification  began. Nostalgia,  you know."  He
smiled shyly,  and the others laughed. Except  Elouise. She was helping Amy
to urinate. She felt  the weight of the small Rectifier in her knapsack and
did not  tell anyone the truth: that she had  never been in Virginia before
in her life.

"Good a spot as any," Heather said. "Well, bye."

Well, bye. That was all, that was the end of it, and Heather walked away to
the west, toward the Shenandoah Valley.

"See ya," Bill said.

"Like hell," Ugly-Bugly added.

Impulsively Ugly-Bugly  hugged Elouise, and Bill  cried, and then they took
off  northeast, toward  the Potomac,  where they  would doubtlessly  find a
community growing up along the clean and fish-filled river.

Just Charlie, Amy, and Elouise left in the empty, blackened fleld where the
airplane had died. Elouise  tried to feel some great pain at the separation
from the  others, but she could  not. They had been  together every day for
years  now, going  from  supply dump  to supply  dump, wrecking  cities and
towns,  destroying and  using up  the artificial  world. But had  they been
friends?  If it had  not been for  their task,  they would never  have been
friends. They were not the same kind of people.

And  then Elouise  was ashamed  of her  feelings. Not  her kind  of people?
Because Heather  liked what grass did  to her and had  never owned a car or
had a driver's license in her life? Because Ugly-Bugly had a face hideously
deformed  by cancer  surgery?  Because Bill  always worked  Jesus  into the
conversation, even  though half  the time he  was an atheist?  Because they
just weren't in the  same social circles? There were no social circles now,
just  people trying  to survive in  a bitter  world they weren't  bred for.
There  were only two  classes now: those  who would  make it and  those who
wouldn't.

Which class am I? thought Elouise.

"Where should we go?" Charlie asked.

Elouise  picked Amy  up and  handed her  to Charlie. "Where's  the capsule,
Charlie?"

Charlie took  Amy and said, "Hey, Amy, baby, I'll  bet we find some farming
community between here and the Rappahannock."

"Doesn't matter if you tell me, Charlie. The instruments found it before we
landed. You  did a damn good job on the  computer program." She didn't have
to say, Not good enough.

Charlie only  smiled crookedly. "Here I was  hoping you were forgetful." He
reached out  to touch her knapsack.  She pulled abruptly away.  He lost his
smile. "Don't you know me?" he asked softly.

He would never try to take the Rectifier from her by force. But still. This
was the  last of the artifacts  they were talking about.  Was anyone really
predictable at such a  time? Elouise was not sure. She had thought she knew
him  well  before,  yet   the  time  capsule  existed  to  prove  that  her
understanding of Charlie was far from complete.

"I know  you, Charlie,"  she said, "but not  as well as I  thought. Does it
matter? Don't try to stop me."

"I hope you're not too angry," he said.

Elouise couldn't  think of anything to say to  that. Anyone could be fooled
by a traitor,  but only I am fool enough to marry  one. She turned from him
and walked into the forest. He took Amy and followed.

All  the way  through  the underbrush  Elouise  kept expecting  him to  say
something. A  threat, for instance: You'll have to  kill me to destroy that
time capsule. Or a  plea: You have to leave it, Elouise, please, please. Or
reason, or argument, or anger, or something.

But  instead  it  was  just  his  silent  footfalls behind  her.  Just  his
occasional playtalk  with Amy. Just his  singing as he put  Amy to sleep on
his shoulder.

The capsule  had been hidden well.  There was no surface  sign that men had
ever been here. Yet, from the Rectifier's emphatic response, it was obvious
that  the  time  capsule  was quite  large.  There  must  have been  heavy,
earthmoving equipment.

Or was it all done by hand?

"When  did you  ever find the  time?" Elouise  asked when they  reached the
spot.

"Long lunch hours," he said.

She set down her knapsack and then stood there, looking at him.

Like a  condemned man who insists on  keeping his composure, Charlie smiled
wryly and said, "Get on with it, please."

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

After Father Charlie died,  Mother Elouise brought me here to Richmond. She
didn't tell anyone that  she was a Wrecker. The angel had already left her,
and she  wanted to blend into the town, be an  ordinary person in the world
she and her fellow angels had created.

Yet  she was  incapable of  blending in.  Once the  angel touches  you, you
cannot go  back, even  when the angel's  work is done.  She first attracted
attention by talking against the stockade. There was once a stockade around
the  town of  Richmond, when there  were only  a thousand people  here. The
reason  was simple:  People still  weren't used  to the  hard way  life was
without the old machines. They had not yet learned to depend on the miracle
of Christ. They still trusted in their hands, yet their hands could work no
more magic. So there were tribes in the winter that didn't know how to find
game, that  had no reserves of grain, that had  no shelter adequate to hold
the head of a fire.

"Bring them  all in," said  Mother Elouise. "There's room  for all. There's
food for  all. Teach  them how to build  ships and make tools  and sail and
farm, and we'll all be richer for it."

But Father  Michael and Uncle  Avram knew more than  Mother Elouise. Father
Michael had been a  Catholic priest before the destruction, and Uncle Avram
had been a professor at a university.

They had  been nobody.  But when the  angels of destruction  finished their
work, the angels of life began to work in the hearts of men. Father Michael
threw off  his old  allegiance to Rome  and taught Christ  simple, from his
memory of  the Holy  Book. Uncle Avram  plunged into his  memory of ancient
metallurgy and taught the  people who gathered at Richmond how to make iron
hard enough to use for tools. And weapons.

Father Michael  forbade the  making of guns  and forbade that  anyone teach
children what  guns were. But for hunting there had  to be arrows, and what
will kill a deer will also kill a man.

Many people agreed with  Mother Elouise about the stockade. But then in the
worst of winter a  tribe came from the mountains and threw fire against the
stockade and against the ships that kept trade alive along the whole coast.
The  archers of  Richmond killed most  of them,  and people said  to Mother
Elouise, "Now you must agree we need the stockade."

Mother Elouise  said, "Would they have come with fire  if there had been no
wall?"

How can anyone judge the greatest need? Just as the angel of death had come
to plant the seeds  of a better life, so that angel of  life had to be hard
and endure  death so the many  could live. Father Michael  and Uncle Avrarn
held to  the laws  of Christ simple, for  did not the Holy  Book say, "Love
your enemies, and smite  them only when they attack you; chase them not out
into the forest, but let them live as long as they leave you alone"?

I  remember that  winter. I  remember watching  while they buried  the dead
tribesmen. Their  bodies had stiffened quickly,  but Mother Elouise brought
me to  see them and said,  "This is death, remember  it, remember it." What
did Mother  Elouise know? Death is  our passage from flesh  into the living
wind, until  Christ brings us  forth into flesh again.  Mother Elouise will
find Father Charlie again, and every wound will be made whole.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elouise knelt  by the Rectifier and  carefully set it to  go off in half an
hour, destroying itself and the time capsule buried thirty meters under the
ground. Charlie  stood near her, watching,  his face nearly expressionless;
only a faint smile  broke his perfect repose. Amy was in his arms, laughing
and trying to reach up to pinch his nose.

"This Rectifier responds only  to me," Elouise said quietly. "Alive. If you
try to move it, it will go off early and kill us all."

"I won't move it," Charlie said.

And Elouise  was finished.  She stood up  and reached for  Amy. Amy reached
back, holding out her arms to her mother. "Mommy," she said.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Because I couldn't remember Father Charlie's face, Mother Elouise thought I
had forgotten  everything about him, but that is  not true. I remember very
clearly one picture of him, but he is not in the picture.

This is very  hard for me to explain. I see a  small clearing in the trees,
with Mother  Elouise standing  in front of me.  I see her at  my eye level,
which tells  me that  I am being held.  I cannot see Father  Charlie, but I
know that he is holding me. I can feel his arms around me, but I cannot see
his face.

This vision has  come to me often. It is not like  other dreams. It is very
clear, and I am always very afraid, and I don't know why. They are talking,
but I  do not  understand their words.  Mother Elouise reaches  for me, but
Father Charlie  will not let me go. I feel  afraid that Father Charlie will
not  let me  go with  Mother Elouise. But  why should  I be afraid?  I love
Father Charlie,  and I  never want to  leave him. Still I  reach out, reach
out, reach out, and still the arms hold me and I cannot go.

Mother Elouise is crying. I see her face twisted in pain. I want to comfort
her. "Mommy is hurt," I say again and again.

And then, suddenly, at  the end of this vision I am in my mother's arms and
we are  running, running up a hill, into the trees.  I am looking back over
her shoulder. I see Father Charlie then. I see him, but I do not see him. I
know exactly  where he  is, in my  vision. I could  tell you  his height. I
could tell  you where  his left foot  is and where  his right  foot is, but
still I  can't see him. He  has no face, no color;  he is just a man-shaped
emptiness in  the clearing,  and then the  trees are in  the way  and he is
gone.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elouise stopped only a  little way into the woods. She turned around, as if
to go back  to Charlie. But she would not go back.  If she returned to him,
it would be to  disconnect the Rectifier. There would be no other reason to
do it.

"Charlie, you son of a bitch!" she shouted.

There was  no answer. She stood,  waiting. Surely he could  come to her. He
would see that she would never go back, never turn off the machine. Once he
realized it  was inevitable, he  would come running from  the machine, into
the forest,  back to  the clearing where  the 787 had landed.  Why would he
want to give his life so meaninglessly? What was in the time capsule, after
all?  Just history--  that's what  he said,  wasn't it? Just  history, just
films and metal plates  engraved with words and microdots and other ways of
preserving the  story of  mankind. "How can  they learn from  our mistakes,
unless we tell them what they were?" Charlie had asked.

Sweet, simple, naive Charlie.  It is one thing to preserve a hatred for the
killing machines  and the  soul-destroying machines and  the garbage-making
machines. It was another to leave behind detailed, accurate, unquestionable
descriptions.  History  was  not  a way  of  preventing  the repetition  of
mistakes. It was a way of guaranteeing them. Wasn't it?

She  turned and  walked  on, not  very quickly,  out  of the  range  of the
Rectifier,  carrying Amy  and  listening, all  the  way, for  the sound  of
Charlie running after her.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

What was Mother Elouise  like? She was a woman of contradictions. Even with
me, she  would work for hours teaching me to  read, helping me make tablets
out of river  clay and write on them with a shaped  stick. And then, when I
had written  the words  she taught me,  she would weep and  say, "Lies, all
lies." Sometimes she would  break the tablets I had made. But whenever part
of her words was broken, she would make me write it again.

She called the collection of words The Book of the Golden Age. I have named
it The Book of the Lies of the Angel Elouise, for it is important for us to
know that the greatest truths we have seem like lies to those who have been
touched by the angel.

She told many stories to me, and often I asked her why they must be written
down. "For Father Charlie," she would always say.

"Is he coming back, then?" I would ask.

But  she shook  her head,  and finally one  time she  said, "It is  not for
Father Charlie to read. It is because Father Charlie wanted it written."

"Then why didn't he write it himself?" I asked.

And  Mother Elouise  grew very  cold with  me, and  all she would  say was,
"Father  Charlie bought  these stories.  He paid  more for  them than  I am
willing to pay to have them left unwritten." I wondered then whether Father
Charlie was rich, but other things she said told me that he wasn't. So I do
not understand except that Mother Elouise did not want to tell the stories,
and Father Charlie, though he was not there, constrained her to tell them.

There are  many of  Mother Elouise's lies that  I love, but I  will say now
which of them she said were most important:

1. In the Golden  Age for ten times a thousand years men lived in peace and
love and joy, and no one did evil one to another. They shared all things in
common, and no man was hungry while another was full, and no man had a home
while another  stood in the rain, and no wife  wept for her husband, killed
before his time.

2. The  great serpent  seems to come  with great power. He  has many names:
Satan, Hitler, Lucifer, Nimrod,  Napoleon. He seems to be beautiful, and he
promises power  to his  friends and death  to his enemies. He  says he will
right all  wrongs. But really he  is weak, until people  believe in him and
give  him the  power  of their  bodies. If  you  refuse to  believe  in the
serpent, if no one serves him, he will go away.

3. There are many cycles of the world. In every cycle the great serpent has
arisen and  the world has been destroyed to make way  for the return of the
Golden Age. Christ comes  again in every cycle, also. One day when He comes
men will  believe in Christ and doubt the great  serpent, and that time the
Golden Age  will never end, and  God will dwell among  men forever. And all
the angels will say,  "Come not to heaven but to Earth, for Earth is heaven
now."

These are the most  important lies of Mother Elouise. Believe them all, and
remember them, for they are true.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

All the  way to the airplane  clearing, Elouise deliberately broke branches
and  let  them dangle  so  that Charlie  would  have no  trouble finding  a
straight path out of the range of the Rectifier, even if he left his flight
to the  last second. She was  sure Charlie would follow  her. Charlie would
bend to  her as he had  always bent, resilient and  accommodating. He loved
Elouise, and  Amy he loved even more. What was in  the metal under his feet
that would weigh in the balance against his love for them?

So Elouise broke the last branch and stepped into the clearing and then sat
down and let Amy play in the unburnt grass at the edge while she waited. It
is Charlie  who will  bend, she said to  herself, for I will  never bend on
this. Later I will  make it up to him, but he must know that on this I will
never bend.

The  cold place  in her  grew larger  and colder  until she  burned inside,
waiting for the sound of feet crashing through the underbrush. The damnable
birds kept singing, so that she could not hear the footsteps.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mother Elouise  never hit me, or  anyone else so far  as I knew. She fought
only with  her words and silent  acts, though she could  have killed easily
with her hands. I  saw her physical power only once. We were in the forest,
to  gather  firewood. We  stumbled  upon  a wild  hog.  Apparently it  felt
cornered, though  we were weaponless; perhaps it was  just mean. I have not
studied the  ways of wild hogs.  It charged, not Mother  Elouise, but me. I
was  five at the  time, and terrified,  I ran  to Mother Elouise,  tried to
cling to her, but she threw me out of the way and went into a crouch. I was
screaming.  She paid  no attention  to me.  The hog continued  rushing, but
seeing I  was down and Mother  Elouise erect, it changed  its path. When it
came near, she leaped to the side. It was not nimble enough to turn to face
her. As  it lumbered past, Mother  Elouise kicked it just  behind the head.
The kick  broke the hog's neck  so violently that its  head dropped and the
hog rolled  over and over, and when it was  through rolling, it was already
dead.

Mother Elouise did not have to die.

She died  in the winter  when I was seven.  I should tell you  how life was
then, in  Richmond. We were only two thousand souls  by then, not the large
city of ten thousand we are now. We had only six finished ships trading the
coast, and  they had not yet gone so far north  as Manhattan, though we had
run one voyage all the way to Savannah in the south. Richmond already ruled
and protected from the Potomac to Dismal Swamp.

But it was a  very hard winter, and the town's leaders insisted on hoarding
all the  stored grain and fruits and vegetables  and meat for our protected
towns, and  let the distant tribes  trade or travel where  they would, they
would get no food from Richmond.

It was  then that  my mother, who claimed  she did not believe  in God, and
Uncle  Avrarn, who was  a Jew, and  Father Michael,  who was a  priest, all
argued the same side of the question. It's better to feed them than to kill
them, they  all said.  But when the  tribes from west of  the mountains and
north  of the  Potomac  came into  Richmond lands,  pleading for  help, the
leaders of Richmond turned  them away and closed the gates of the towns. An
army marched then, to put the fear of God, as they said, into the hearts of
the tribesmen. They did not know which side God was on.

Father Michael argued and Uncle Avram stormed and fumed, but Mother Elouise
silently went  to the gate at moonrise one  night and alone overpowered the
guards. Silently she gagged them and bound them and opened the gates to the
hungry tribesmen.  They came through weaponless,  as she had insisted. They
quietly went to the storehouses and carried off as much food as they could.
They were found only as the last few fled. No one was killed.

But there was an  uproar, a cry of treason, a trial, and an execution. They
decided on beheading, because  they thought it would be quick and merciful.
They had never seen a beheading.

It  was  Jack Woods  who  used  the ax.  He  practiced  all afternoon  with
pumpkins. Pumpkins have no bones.

In the  evening they all gathered to watch,  some because they hated Mother
Elouise, some  because they loved her, and the  rest because they could not
stay away.  I went also, and Father Michael held my  head and would not let
me see. But I heard.

Father  Michael prayed for  Mother Elouise.  Mother Elouise damned  his and
everyone else's soul to  hell. She said, "If you kill me for bringing life,
you will only bring death on your own heads. "

"That's true," said the  men around her. "We will all die. But you will die
first."

"Then I'm  the luckier," said Mother Elouise. It was  the last of her lies,
for she was telling  the truth, and yet she did not believe it herself, for
I heard  her weep. With her last breaths she  wept and cried out, "Charlie!
Charlie!" There are those who claim she saw a vision of Charlie waiting for
her on  the right hand of  God, but I doubt  it. She would have  said so. I
think she only wished to see him. Or wished for his forgiveness. It doesn't
matter. The angel had long since left her, and she was alone.

Jack swung the ax and it fell, more with a smack than a thud. He had missed
her neck and struck  deep in her back and shoulder. She screamed. He struck
again and  this time silenced her.  But he did not  break through her spine
until  the third  blow.  Then he  turned  away splattered  with blood,  and
vomited and wept and pleaded with Father Michael to forgive him.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Amy  stood a  few meters  away from Elouise,  who sat  on the grass  of the
clearing, looking  toward a broken branch on  the nearest tree. Amy called,
"Mommy! Mommy!"  Then she  bounced up and  down, bending and  unbending her
knees. "Da!  Da!" she cried. "La  la la la la."  She was dancing and wanted
her mother to dance and sing, too. But Elouise only looked toward the tree,
waiting for  Charlie to appear. Any minute, she  thought. He will be angry.
He will be ashamed, she thought. But he will be alive.

In the  distance, however, the air  all at once was  shining. Elouise could
see it  clearing because they were  not far from the  edge of the Rectifier
field. It  shimmered in the trees,  where it caused no  harm to plants. Any
vertebrates within the field, any animals that lived by electricity passing
along nerves, were instantly dead, their brains stilled. Birds dropped from
tree limbs. Only insects droned on.

The Rectifier field lasted only minutes.

Amy watched the shining air. It was as if the empty sky itself were dancing
with  her. She  was  transfixed. She  would soon  forget the  airplane, and
already her father's face was disappearing from her memories. But she would
remember  the shining.  She  would see  it forever  in  her dreams,  a vast
thickening of  the air, dancing and vibrating up and  down, up and down. In
her dreams it would always be the same, a terrible shining light that would
grow and grow and grow and press against her in her bed. And always with it
would come  the sound of a voice she  loved, saying, "Jesus. Jesus. Jesus."
This dream would come so clearly when she was twelve that she would tell it
to her  adopted father, the priest  named Michael. He told  her that it was
the voice  of an angel, speaking the name of the  source of all light. "You
must not fear the light," he said. "You must embrace it." It satisfied her.

But at the moment  she first heard the voice, in fact and not in dream, she
had no  trouble recognizing  it, it was  the voice of  her mother, Elouise,
saying,  "Jesus." It  was full  of grief  that only  a child could  fail to
understand.  Amy did  not understand.  She only  tried to repeat  the word,
"Deeah-zah."

"God," said  Elouise, rocking back and  forth, her face turned  up toward a
heaven she was sure was unoccupied.

"Dog," Amy  repeated, "Dog dog doggie."  In vain she looked  around for the
four-footed beast.

"Charlie!" Elouise screamed as the Rectifier field faded.

"Daddy,"  Amy cried,  and  because of  her  mother's tears  she also  wept.
Elouise took her daughter in her arms and held her, rocking back and forth.
Elouise discovered that there  were some things that could not be frozen in
her. Some things that  must burn: Sunlight. And lightning. And everlasting,
inextinguishable regret.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

My mother,  Mother Elouise,  often told me  about my father.  She described
Father  Charlie in detail,  so I would  not forget.  She refused to  let me
forget anything. "It's what Father Charlie died for," she told me, over and
over. "He died so you would remember. You cannot forget."

So I still remember, even today, every word she told me about him. His hair
was red, as mine was. His body was lean and hard. His smile was quick, like
mine, and he had  gentle hands. When his hair was long or sweaty, it kinked
tightly at his forehead, ears, and neck. His touch was so delicate he could
cut in  half an animal so  tiny it could not be  seen without a machine; so
sensitive that  he could  fly-- an art  that Mother Elouise said  was not a
miracle, since it could  be done by many giants of the Golden Age, and they
took  with them  many others who  could not  fly alone. This  was Charlie's
gift, Mother Elouise said. She also told me that I loved him dearly.

But for  all the words  that she taught me,  I still have no  picture of my
father in my mind.  It is as if the words drove out the vision, as so often
happens.

Yet I still hold  that one memory of my father, so deeply hidden that I can
neither  lose it  nor fully  find it  again. Sometimes  I wake  up weeping.
Sometimes I wake up with my arms in the air, curved just so, and I remember
that  I was  dreaming of  embracing that  large man  who loved me.  My arms
remember  how it  feels to hold  Father Charlie  tight around the  neck and
cling to  him as  he carries his  child. And when  I cannot  sleep, and the
pillow seems  to be always the wrong shape, it is  because I am hunting for
the shape of Father Charlie's shoulder, which my heart remembers, though my
mind cannot.

God put  angels into Mother Elouise and  Father Charlie, and they destroyed
the world, for the  cup of God's indignation was full, and all the works of
men become dust,  but out of dust God makes men, and  out of men and women,
angels.

KINGSMEAT

The gatekeeper recognized him  and the gate fell away. The Shepherd put his
ax and his crook  into the bag at his belt and stepped out onto the bridge.
As always he  felt a rush of vertigo as he walked  the narrow arch over the
foaming acid of the  moat. Then he was across and striding down the road to
the village.

A child was playing with a dog on a grassy hillside. The Shepherd looked up
at him,  his fine dark face  made bright by his  eyes. The boy shrank back,
and  the Shepherd  heard a woman's  voice cry  out, "Back here,  Derry, you
fool!" The Shepherd walked  on down the road as the boy retreated among the
hayricks on the far slope. The Shepherd could hear the scolding: "Play near
the castle again, and he'll make kingsmeat of you."

Kingsmeat, thought the Shepherd. How the king does get hungry. The word had
come down through the quick grapevine-- steward to cook to captain to guard
to shepherd and then he was dressed and out the door only minutes after the
king  had muttered,  "For supper, what  is your  taste?" and the  queen had
fluttered all her arms and said, "Not stew again, I hope," and the king had
murmured  as he  picked up the  computer printouts  of the day,  "Breast in
butter," and so now the Shepherd was out to harvest from the flock.

The village  was still in the distance when the  Shepherd began to pass the
people.  He remembered  the time,  back when  the king  had first  made his
tastes known,  when there  had been many  attempts to evade  the villagers'
duties to  the king. Now they only  watched, perhaps hiding the unblemished
members of the flock, sometimes thrusting them forward to end the suspense;
but mostly  the Shepherd saw the  old legless, eyeless, or  armless men and
women  who hobbled  about  their duties  with those  limbs that  were still
intact.

Those with fingers thatched  or wove; those with eyes led those whose hands
were their  only contact with the world; those with  arms rode the backs of
those with legs; and  all of them took their only solace in sad and sagging
beds,  producing,  after a  suitable  interval,  children whose  miraculous
wholeness made  them gods  to a surprised  and wondering mother,  made them
hated  reminders to  a father whose  tongue had  fallen from his  mouth, or
whose toes  had somehow  been mislaid, or  whose buttocks were  a scar, his
legs a useless reminder of hams long since dropped off.

"Ah, such beauty," a  woman murmured, pumping the bellows at the bread-oven
fire.  There was  a sour  grunt from  the legless  hag who shoveled  in the
loaves and  turned them with a  wooden shovel. It was  true, of course, for
the Shepherd  was never touched, no indeed. (No  indeed, came the echo from
the  midnight fires of  Unholy Night,  when dark tales  frightened children
half out  of their wits, dark  tales that the shrunken  grown-ups knew were
true, were inevitable, were tomorrow.) The Shepherd had long dark hair, and
his  mouth was firm  but kind, and  his eyes  flashed sunlight even  in the
dark, it  seemed, while his hands were soft  from bathing, large and strong
and dark and smooth and fearful.

And the  Shepherd walked into the village to a house  he had noted the last
time he  came. He went to the door and immediately  heard a sigh from every
other house, and silence from the one that he had picked.

He raised his  hand before the door and it opened, as  it had been built to
do:  for all  things that opened  served the  Shepherd's will, or  at least
served the bright metal ball the king had implanted in his hand. Inside the
house it was dark, but not too dark to see the white eyes of an old man who
lay in a hammock, legs dangling bonelessly. The man could see his future in
the Shepherd's eyes-- or so he thought, at least, until the Shepherd walked
past him into the kitchen.

There a  young woman, no older than fifteen, stood  in front of a cupboard,
her hands clenched to do violence. But the Shepherd only shook his head and
raised his hand, and  the cupboard answered him and opened however much she
pushed against  it, revealing a murmuring  baby wrapped in sound-smothering
blankets. The  Shepherd only smiled and shook his  head. His smile was kind
and beautiful, and the woman wanted to die.

He  stroked her  cheek and she  sighed softly,  moaned softly, and  then he
reached into  his bag  and pulled out  his shepherd's crook  and leaned the
little disc  against her temple and she smiled. Her  eyes were dead but her
lips were  alive and her teeth showed. He laid  her on the floor, carefully
opened her blouse, and then took his ax from his bag.

He ran  his finger around the long, narrow cylinder  and a tiny light shone
at one  end. Then he touched  the ax's glowing tip  to the underside of her
breast and drew a  wide circle. Behind the ax a tiny red line followed, and
the Shepherd  took hold of the breast and it came  away in his hand. Laying
it  aside, he stroked  the ax lengthwise  and the  light changed to  a dull
blue. He  passed the ax over the red wound, and  the blood gelled and dried
and the wound began to heal.

He placed  the breast  into his bag  and repeated the process  on the other
side. Tbrough  it the  woman watched in disinterested  amusement, the smile
still playing  at her lips. She  would smile like that  for days before the
peace wore off.

When the second breast was in his bag, the Shepherd put away the ax and the
crook and carefully buttoned the woman's blouse. He helped her to her feet,
and again  passed his  deft and gentle  hand across her cheek.  Like a baby
rooting she turned her lips toward his fingers, but he withdrew his hand.

As  he left, the  woman took the  baby from  the cupboard and  embraced it,
cooing softly.  The baby nuzzled against the  strangely harsh bosom and the
woman smiled and sang a lullaby.

The Shepherd walked through  the streets, the bag at his belt jostling with
his steps.  The people watched the bag, wondering  what it held. But before
the Shepherd was out of the village the word had spread, and the looks were
no longer  at the bag but rather at the  Shepherd's face. He looked neither
to the  left nor to  the right, but he  felt their gazes and  his eyes grew
soft and sad.

And then  he was  back at the  moat, across the narrow  bridge, through the
gate, and into the high dark corridors of the castle.

He took  the bag to the  cook, who looked at  him sourly. The Shepherd only
smiled at  him and took  his crook from the  bag. In a moment  the cook was
docile, and calmly he began to cut the red flesh into thin slices, which he
lightly floured and then placed in a pan of simmering butter. The smell was
strong and sweet, and the flecks of milk sizzled in the pan.

The  Shepherd stayed  in the  kitchen, watching,  as the cook  prepared the
king's meal. Then he followed to the door of the dining hall as the steward
entered the  king's presence with the  steaming slices on a  tray. The king
and queen ate silently, with severe but gracious rituals of shared servings
and gifts of finest morsels.

And at  the end of  the meal the king  murmured a word to  the steward, who
beckoned both the cook and the Shepherd into the hall.

The cook, the steward,  and the Shepherd knelt before the king, who reached
out three  arms to touch  their heads. Through long  practice they accepted
his  touch without  recoiling, without  even blinking,  for they  knew such
things displeased him. After all, it was a great gift that they could serve
the king:  their services  kept them from  giving kingsmeat from  their own
flesh,  or from  decorating  with their  skin the  tapestried walls  of the
castle or the long train of a hunting-cape.

The king's  armpits still  touched the heads  of the three  servants when a
shudder ran through the castle and a low warning tone began to drone.

The king and queen  left the table and with deliberate dignity moved to the
consoles and  sat. There  they pressed buttons,  setting in motion  all the
unseeable defenses of the castle.

After an hour of exhausting concentration they recognized defeat and pulled
their arms back from  the now-useless tasks they had been doing. The fields
of force that had  long held the thin walls of the castle to their delicate
height  now  lapsed, the  walls  fell,  and a  shining  metal ship  settled
silently in the middle of the ruins.

The side  of the  skyship opened and  out of it  came four  men, weapons in
their hands and anger in their eyes. Seeing them, the king and queen looked
sadly at  each other and then  pulled the ritual knives  from their resting
place  behind  their  heads and  simultaneously  plunged  them between  one
another's eyes.  They died  instantly, and the  twenty-two-year conquest of
Abbey Colony was at an end.

Dead, the  king and queen looked like sad squids lying  flat and empty on a
fisherman's deck, not at  all like conquerors of planets and eaters of men.
The men  from the skyship walked to the corpses  and made certain they were
dead. Then  they looked  around and realized  for the first  time that they
were not alone.

For  the Shepherd,  the steward,  and the  cook stood  in the ruins  of the
palace, their eyes wide with unbelief.

One of the men from the ship reached out a hand.

"How can you be alive?" he asked.

They did not answer, not knowing really what the question meant.

"How have you survived here, when--"

And then there were no words, for they looked beyond the palace, across the
moat to  the crowd  of colonists and  sons of colonists  who stood watching
them. And seeing them  there without arms and legs and eyes and breasts and
lips, the men from the ship emptied their hands of weapons and filled their
palms with tears and  then crossed the bridge to grieve among the delivered
ones' rejoicing.

There was  no time  for explanations, nor  was there a  need. The colonists
crept and hobbled and, occasionally, walked across the bridge to the ruined
palace and  formed a circle around  the bodies of the  king and queen. Then
they set to work, and within an hour the corpses were lying in the pit that
had been  the foundation  of the castle,  covered with urine  and feces and
stinking already of decay.

Then the colonists turned to the servants of the king and queen.

The  men  from the  ship  had  been chosen  on  a distant  world for  their
judgment, speed,  and skill, and before the mob  had found its common mind,
before they  had begun to move, there was  a forcefence around the steward,
the cook, and the gatekeeper, and the guards. Even around the Shepherd, and
though  the crowd  mumbled its  resentment, one  of the  men from  the ship
patiently explained in soothing  tones that whatever crimes were done would
be punished in due time, according to Imperial justice.

The fence stayed up  for a week as the men from the  ship worked to put the
colony in order, struggling  to interest the people in the fields that once
again belonged  completely to  them. At last  they gave up,  realizing that
justice could  not wait.  They took the  machinery of the court  out of the
ship, gathered the people together, and began the trial.

The colonists  waited as the men  from the ship taped  a metal plate behind
each person's right ear. Even the servants in their prison and the men from
the  ship were  fitted with  them, and  then the  trial began,  each person
testifying directly from his memory into the minds of every other person.

The court  first heard the testimony  of the men from  the ship. The people
closed  their eyes  and saw  men in  a huge  starship, pushing  buttons and
speaking rapidly  into computers.  Finally expressions of  relief, and four
men entering a skyship to go down.

The  people  saw that  it  was  not their  world,  for here  there were  no
survivors. Instead there was just a castle, just a king and queen, and when
they were  dead, just  fallow fields and  the ruins of  a village abandoned
many years before.

They saw  the same scene again  and again. Only Abbey  Colony had any human
beings left alive.

Then they  watched as bodies of  kings and queens on  other worlds were cut
open. A  chamber within the queen split wide, and  there in a writhing mass
of life lived a  thousand tiny fetuses, many-armed and bleeding in the cold
air outside  the womb. Thirty years of gestation, and  then two by two they
would have  continued to  conquer and rape  other worlds in  an unstoppable
epidemic across the galaxy.

But  in the  womb,  it was  stopped, and  the fetuses  were sprayed  with a
chemical and  soon they  lay still and  dried into shriveled  balls of gray
skin.

The  testimony of the  men from the  ship ended,  and the court  probed the
memories of the colonists:

A screaming from the sky, and a blast of light, and then the king and queen
descending  without  machinery. But  the  devices follow  quickly, and  the
people  are beaten  by  invisible whips  and forced  into  a pen  that they
watched grow from nothing into a dark, tiny room that they barely fit into,
standing.

Heavy air,  impossible to  breathe. A woman  fainting, then a  man, and the
screams and cries deafening.  Sweat until bodies are dry, heat until bodies
are cold, and then a trembling through the room.

A  door, and  then  the king,  huger than  any had  thought, his  many arms
revolting. Vomit on your back from the man behind, then your own vomit, and
your bladder  empties in fear. The arms reach,  and screams are all around,
screams in all throats, screams until all voices are silenced. Then one man
plucked writhing from the  crowd, the door closed again, darkness back, and
the stench and heat and terror greater than before.

Silence. And in the distance a drawn-out cry of agony.

Silence. Hours.  And then the open  door again, the king  again, the scream
again.

The third time the  king is in the door and out of  the crowd walks one who
is  not screaming, whose  shirt is caked  with stale  vomit but who  is not
vomiting, whose  eyes are calm and  whose lips are at  peace and whose eyes
shine. The Shepherd, though known then by another name.

He walks to the  king and reaches out his hand, and he is not seized. He is
led, and he walks out, and the door closes.

Silence. Hours. And still no scream.

And then the pen  is gone, into the nothing it seemed to come from, and the
air is clear  and the sun is shining and the grass  is green. There is only
one change:  the castle, rising high and delicately  and madly in an upward
tumble of spires and domes. A moat of acid around it. A slender bridge.

And then back to the village, all of them. The houses are intact, and it is
almost possible to forget.

Until the Shepherd walks through the village streets. He is still called by
the old name-- what was the name? And the people speak to him, ask him what
is in the castle,  what do the king and queen want, why were we imprisoned,
why are we free.

But the  Shepherd only points to  a baker. The man  steps out, the Shepherd
touches  him on the  temple with his  crook, and  the man smiles  and walks
toward the castle.

Four strong men likewise sent on their way, and a boy, and another man, and
then the people begin to murmur and shrink back from the Shepherd. His face
is still  beautiful, but  they remember the  scream they heard  in the pen.
They do not want to go to the castle. They do not trust the empty smiles of
those who go.

And  then the  Shepherd comes  again, and  again, and  limbs are  lost from
living men  and women. There are  plans. There are attacks.  But always the
Shepherd's  crook or  the Shepherd's  unseen whip  stops them.  Always they
return crippled to their houses. And they wait. And they hate.

And there are many who wish they had died in the first terrified moments of
the attack. But never once does the Shepherd kill.

The testimony of the  people ended, and the court let them pause before the
trial  went on.  They  needed time  to dry  their eyes  of the  tears their
memories shed. They needed  time to clear their throats of the thickness of
silent cries.

And  then they  closed their eyes  again and  watched the testimony  of the
Shepherd. This  time there were not many  different views; they all watched
through one pair of eyes:

The pen  again, crowds huddled in  terror. The door opens,  as before. Only
this time  all of them  walk toward the king  in the door, and  all of them
hold out a hand,  and all of them feel a cold tentacle wrap around and lead
them from the pen.

The castle grows closer,  and they feel the fear of it. But also there is a
quietness, a  peace that is pressed down on the  terror, a peace that holds
the face calm and the heart to its normal beat.

The castle.  A narrow bridge, and acid in a moat.  A gate opens. The bridge
is  crossed with a  moment of vertigo  when the  king seems about  to push,
about to throw his prey into the moat.

And then  the vast dining hall,  and the queen at  the console, shaping the
world according to the pattern that will bring her children to life.

You stand  alone at the  head of the table,  and the king and  queen sit on
high stools and watch  you. You look at the table and see enough to realize
why the  others screamed.  You feel a  scream rise in  your throat, knowing
that  you,  and then  all  the  others, will  be  torn like  that, will  be
half-devoured, will  be left  in a pile  of gristle and bone  until all are
gone.

And then you press down the fear, and you watch.

The  king  and  queen  raise  and  lower  their arms,  undulating  them  in
syncopated patterns.  They seem to  be conversing. Is there  meaning in the
movements?

You will find out.  You also extend an arm, and try to imitate the patterns
that you see.

They stop moving and watch you.

You pause for a moment, unsure. Then you undulate your arms again.

They move  in a flurry of  arms and soft sounds.  You also imitate the soft
sounds.

And  then they  come for  you. You  steel yourself,  vow that you  will not
scream, knowing that you will not be able to stop yourself.

A cold  arm touches you and  you grow faint. And then  you are led from the
room, away from the table, and it grows dark.

They keep  you for weeks. Amusement.  You are kept alive  to entertain them
when they  grow weary of their  work. But as you  imitate them you begin to
learn, and they begin  to teach you, and soon a sort of stammering language
emerges, they  speaking slowly with  their loose arms and  soft voices, you
with only two arms trying to imitate, then initiate words. The strain of it
is killing, but at  last you tell them what you want to tell them, what you
must tell them before they become bored and look at you again as meat.

You teach them how to keep a herd.

And so they make you a shepherd, with only one duty: to give them meat in a
never-ending supply. You have told them you can feed them and never run out
of manflesh, and they are intrigued.

They go to their surgical supplies and give you a crook so there will be no
pain or struggle, and an ax for the butchery and healing, and on a piece of
decaying flesh they show you how to use them. In your hand they implant the
key  that commands every  hinge in the  village. And  then you go  into the
colony and  proceed to  murder your fellowmen  bit by bit in  order to keep
them all alive.

You  do not  speak. You  hide from  their hatred  in silence. You  long for
death,  but it  does not  come, because  it cannot  come. If you  died, the
colony would die, and  so to save their lives you continue a life not worth
living.

And then  the castle  falls and you  are finished and  you hide  the ax and
crook in a certain place in the earth and wait for them all to kill you.

The trial ended.

The  people  pulled  the   plates  from  behind  their  ears,  and  blinked
unbelieving at the afternoon sunlight. They looked at the beautiful face of
the Shepherd and their faces wore unreadable expressions.

"The verdict  of the court," a  man from the ship  read as the others moved
through  the  crowd collecting  witness  plates,  "is that  the man  called
Shepherd is guilty of  gross atrocities. However, these atrocities were the
sole means of keeping  alive those very persons against whom the atrocities
were  perpetrated. Therefore,  the man  called Shepherd  is cleared  of all
charges. He is not  to be put to death, and instead shall be honored by the
people of Abbey  Colony at least once a year and helped  to live as long as
science and prudence can keep a man alive."

It  was the  verdict of the  court, and  despite their twenty-two  years of
isolation the people of Abbey Colony would never disobey Imperial law.

Weeks later  the work of the men from the  ship was finished. They returned
to the sky. The people governed themselves as they had before.

Somewhere between stars three of the men in the ship gathered after supper.
"A shepherd, of all things," said one.

"A bloody good one, though," said another.

The fourth  man seemed to be  asleep. He was not,  however, and suddenly he
sat up and cried out, "My God, what have we done!"

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Over the  years Abbey Colony thrived,  and a new generation  grew up strong
and uncrippled. They told their children's children the story of their long
enslavement, and freedom was  treasured; freedom and strength and wholeness
and life.

And every year, as the court had commanded, they went to a certain house in
the  village carrying  gifts  of grain  and milk  and  meat. They  lined up
outside the door, and one by one entered to do honor to the Shepherd.

They walked  by the table where  he was propped so  he could see them. Each
came in  and looked  into the beautiful  face with the gentle  lips and the
soft eyes. There were no large strong hands now, however. Only a head and a
neck and a  spine and ribs and a loose sac of  flesh that pulsed with life.
The people  looked over his naked  body and saw the  scars. Here had been a
leg and  a hip,  right? Yes, and  here he had  once had  genitals, and here
shoulders and arms.

How does he live? asked the little ones, wondering.

We keep him alive,  the older ones answered. The verdict of the court, they
said year  after year. We'll keep  him as long as  science and prudence can
keep a man alive.

Then they  set down  their gifts and  left, and at  the end of  the day the
Shepherd was moved back to his hammock, where year after year he looked out
the window  at the weathers of  the sky. They would,  perhaps, have cut out
his tongue, but since  he never spoke, they didn't think of it. They would,
perhaps, have cut out his eyes, but they wanted him to see them smile.

HOLY

"You  have weapons  that  could stop  them," said  Crofe, and  suddenly the
needle felt heavy on my belt.

"I can't  use them," I said.  "Not even the needle.  And definitely not the
splinters."

Crofe  did not seem  surprised, but the  others did,  and I was  angry that
Crofe would put  me in such a position. He knew the  law. But now Stone was
looking at  me darkly, his bow on his lap, and  Fole openly grumbled in his
deep, giant's voice. "We're friends, right? Friends, they say."

"It's  the  law," I  said.  "I can't  use  these weapons  except in  proper
self-defense."

"Their arrows are coming as close to you as to us," Stone said.

"As long  as I'm with you,  the law assumes that  they're attacking you and
not me.  If I used  my weapons, it would  seem like I was  taking sides. It
would be putting the  corporation on your side against their side. It would
mean the end of the corporation's involvement with you."

"Fine with me," Fole murmured. "Fat lot of good it's done us."

I didn't mention that I would also be executed. The Ylymyny have little use
for people who fear death.

In the  distance someone  screamed. I looked  around-- none of  them seemed
worried. But in a  moment Da came into the circle of stones, panting. "They
found the slanting road,  " he whispered. "Nothing we could do. Killed one,
that's all."

Crofe stood and uttered  a high-pitched cry, a staccato burst of sound that
echoed from  the crags  around us. Then  he nodded to the  others, and Fole
reached over  and seized my arm. "Come on," he  whispered. But I hung back,
not wanting to be shuffled out without any idea of what was going on.

"What's happening?" I asked.

Crofe grinned,  his black teeth startling  (after all these months) against
his light-brown  skin. "We're going to try to  live through this. Lead them
into a trap. Away off south there's a narrow pass where a hundred of my men
wait for us  to bring them game." As he spoke, four  more men came into the
circle of stones, and Crofe turned to them.

"Gokoke?" he asked. The others shrugged.

Crofe glowered. "We don't  leave Gokoke." They nodded, and the four who had
just come  went back silently into  the paths of the  rock. Now Fole became
more insistent, and Stone softly whined, "We must go, Crofe."

"Not without Gokoke."

There was a mournful wail that sounded as if it came from all around. Which
was echo and which  was original sound? Impossible to tell. Crofe bowed his
head,  squatted, covered  his  eyes ritually  with his  hands,  and chanted
softly.  The others  did likewise; Fole  even released  my arm so  he could
cover his  face. It occurred to me that  though their piety was impressive,
covering  one's eyes during  a battle  might well be  a counterevolutionary
behavior. Every  now and then the old anthropologist  in me surfaces, and I
get clinical.

I wasn't  clinical, however,  when a Golyny  soldier leaped from  the rocks
into  the circle. He  was armed with  two long  knives, and he  was already
springing into action. I  noticed that he headed directly for Crofe. I also
noticed that none of the Ylymyny made the slightest move to defend him.

What could  I do? It was  forbidden for me to kill;  yet Crofe was the most
influential of  the warlords  of the Ylymyny.  I couldn't let  him die. His
friendship was our best  toehold in trading with the people of the islands.
And besides,  I don't like watching a person  being murdered while his eyes
are covered  in a religious rite, however asinine  the rite might be. Which
is why  I certainly bent  the law, if I  didn't break it: my  toe found the
Golyny's groin  just as the  knife began its downward  slash toward Crofe's
neck.

The  Golyny groaned;  the  knife forgotten,  he clutched  at  himself, then
reached  out to  attack  me. To  my  surprise, the  others continued  their
chanting, as  if unaware that I was  protecting them, at not inconsiderable
risk to myself.

I could have killed the Golyny in a moment, but I didn't dare. instead, for
an endless three or  four minutes I battled with him, disarming him quickly
but unable  to strike him a  blow that would knock  him unconscious without
running the  risk of accidentally killing him. I  broke his arm; he ignored
the pain,  it seemed, and continued to attack--  continued, in fact, to use
the broken  arm. What kind of  people are these? I  wondered as I blocked a
vicious kick  with an equally vicious  blow from my heavy  boot. Don't they
feel pain?

And at last the  chanting ended, and in a moment Fole had broken the Golyny
soldier's neck with one  blow. "Jass!" he hissed, nursing his hand from the
pain, "what a neck!"

"Why the  hell didn't somebody help me before?"  I demanded. I was ignored.
Obviously    an   offworlder    wouldn't    understand.   Now    the   four
that  had gone  off to  bring back  Gokoke returned,  their hands  red with
already drying blood. They held out their hands; Crofe, Fole, Stone, and Da
licked  the blood just  slightly, swallowing  with expressions of  grief on
their faces.  Then Crofe  clicked twice in  his throat, and  again Fole was
pulling  me out  of  the circle  of stones.  This  time, however,  all were
coming. Crofe was in  the lead, tumbling madly along a path that a mountain
goat would have rejected  as being too dangerous. I tried to tell Fole that
it would  be easier for me  if he'd let go  of my arm; at  the first sound,
Stone whirled around ahead of us, slapped my face with all his force, and I
silently swallowed my own blood as we continued down the path.

Suddenly the  path ended on the crown of a rocky  outcrop that seemed to be
at the end of the world.

Far  below the  lip of  the smooth  rock, the  vast plain of  Ylymyn Island
spread to every horizon.  The blue at the edges hinted at ocean, but I knew
the sea was too  far away to be seen. Clouds drifted here and there between
us  and the  plain; patches  of jungle  many kilometers across  seemed like
threads and blots on  the farmland and dazzling white cities. And all of it
gave us  a view that reminded  me too much of what  I had seen looking from
the spacecraft while we orbited this planet not that many months ago.

We paused  only a moment on  the dome; immediately they  scrambled over the
edge, seeming to plunge  from our vantage point into midair. I, too, leaped
over the  edge-- I had no  choice, with Fole's unrelenting  grip. As I slid
down the ever-steeper slope  of rock, I could see nothing below me to break
my fall.  I almost screamed; held the scream back  because if by some faint
chance we were not committing mass suicide, a scream would surely bring the
Golyny.

And then  the rock  dropped away under me  and I did fall,  for one endless
meter until  I stopped,  trembling, on a  ledge scarcely a  meter wide. The
others  were already  there-- Fole  had taken  me more slowly,  I supposed,
because of my inexperience. Forcing myself to glance over the edge, I could
see that this peak did not continue as a smooth, endless wall right down to
the flat  plain. There were other  peaks that seemed like  foothills to us,
but I knew they were mountains in their own right. It was little comfort to
know that if I  fell it would be only a few hundred meters, and not five or
six kilometers after all.

Crofe started off at a run, and we followed. Soon the ledge that had seemed
narrow at a meter  in width narrowed to less than a third of that; yet they
scarcely seemed to slow down as Fole dragged me crabwise along the front of
the cliff.

Abruptly we came to  a large, level area, which gave way to a narrow saddle
between  our peak  and  another much  lower one  that stood  scarcely forty
meters  away. The  top of  it was  rocky and  irregular-- perhaps,  once we
crossed the saddle, we could hide there and elude pursuit.

Crofe did  not lead this time.  Instead, Da ran lightly  across the saddle,
making it quickly to  the other side. He immediately turned and scanned the
rocks above us, then  waved. Fole followed, dragging me. I would never have
crossed the saddle alone.  With Fole pulling me, I had scarcely the time to
think about the drop off to either side of the slender path.

And  then I watched  from the rocks  as the  others came across.  Crofe was
last,  and just as  he stepped out  onto the  saddle, the rocks  above came
alive with Golyny.

They were  silent (I had battle-trained with loud  weapons; my only war had
been  filled  with  screams   and  explosions;  this  silent  warfare  was,
therefore, all  the more  terrifying), and the  men around me  quickly drew
bows to  fire; Golyny dropped, but  so did Crofe, an  arrow neatly piercing
his head from behind.

Was he dead? He had to be. But he fell straddling the narrow ridge, so that
he did not plummet  down to the rocks below. Another arrow entered his back
near his  spine. And then, before the enemy could  fire again, Fole was out
on the  ridge, had  hoisted Crofe on  his shoulders, and  brought him back.
Even at that, the only shots the enemy got off seemed aimed not at Fole but
at Crofe.

We retreated into the  rocks, except for two bowmen who stayed to guard the
saddle. We  were safe enough-- it  would take hours for  the Golyny to find
another way up to this peak. And so our attention was focused on Crofe.

His eyes  were open, and he  still breathed. But he  stared straight ahead,
making no  effort to talk. Stone held his shoulders  as Da pushed the arrow
deeper into his head. The point emerged, bloody, from Crofe's forehead.

Da  leaned over and  took the arrowhead  in his  teeth. He pulled,  and the
flint came  loose. He spat it out and then withdrew  the shaft of the arrow
backward through the wound. Through all this, Crofe made no sound. And when
the operation had finished, Crofe died.

This time there was no ritual of closed eyes and chanting. Instead, the men
around me  openly wept--  openly, but silently. Sobs  wracked their bodies;
tears leaped  from their eyes; their faces contorted  in an agony of grief.
But there was no sound, not even heavy breathing.

The grief  was not something to be ignored. And though  I did not know them
at all well, Crofe  was the one I had known best. Not intimately, certainly
not as  a friend, because the  barriers were too great.  But I had seen him
dealing with  his people,  and whatever culture  you come from,  there's no
hiding a man of  power. Crofe had that power. In the assemblies when we had
first  petitioned for  the right  to trade,  Crofe had forced  (arguing, it
seemed, alone,  though later  I realized that  he had many  powerful allies
that he  preferred to marshal silently) the men and  women there to make no
restrictions,  to  leave  no  prohibitions, and  to  see  instead what  the
corporation had to sell.  It was a foot in the door. But Crofe had taken me
aside alone  and informed me that nothing was to  be brought to the Ylymyny
without  his  knowledge or  approval.  And now  he  was dead  on a  routine
scouting mission,  and I could not help but be  amazed that the Ylymyny, in
other ways  an incredibly shrewd people,  should allow their wisest leaders
to  waste themselves  on  meaningless forays  in the  borderlands  and high
mountains.

And  for some  reason I  found myself  also grieved  at Crofe's  death. The
corporation, of course, would continue to progress in its dealings with the
Ylymyny-- would,  indeed, have  an easier time  of it now. But  Crofe was a
worthy bargaining  partner. And he and I had  loved the game of bargaining,
however many barriers our mutual strangeness kept between us.

I watched  as his  soldiers stripped his  corpse. They buried  the clothing
under rocks. And then they hacked at the skin with their knives, opening up
the man's  bowels and splitting the intestines from  end to end. The stench
was  powerful; I  barely  avoided vomiting.  They worked  intently, finding
every scrap of material that had been passing through the bowel and putting
it in a small  leather bag. When the intestine was as clean as stone knives
could scrape it,  they closed the bag, and Da tied it  around his neck on a
string. Then, tears still streaming down his face, he turned to the others,
looking at them all, one by one.

"I will go to the mountain," he whispered.

The others nodded; some wept harder.

"I will  give his soul to  the sky," Da whispered,  and now the others came
forward, touched the bag and whispered, "I, too. I, also. I vow."

Hearing the  faint noise, the two  archers guarding the saddle  came to our
sanctuary among the stones and were about to add their vows to those of the
others when Da held up his hand and forbade them.

"Stay and hold off pursuit. They are sure to know."

Sadly, the  two nodded, moved back to their  positions. And Fole once again
gripped my arm as we moved silently away from the crest of the peak.

"Where are we going?" I whispered.

"To honor Crofe's soul." Stone turned and answered me.

"What about the ambush?"

"We are now about matters more important than that."

The Ylymyny  worshiped the sky-- or  some thing akin to  worship, at least.
That much  I knew from my  scanty research into their  religious beliefs in
the city on the plain, where I had first landed.

"Stone," I said, "will the enemy know what we're doing?"

"Of course,"  he whispered back. "They may be  infidels, but they know what
honor binds the righteous to do. They'll try to trap us on the way, destroy
us, and stop us from doing honor to the dead."

And then  Da hissed for us  to be quiet, and  we soundlessly scrambled down
the cliffs and slopes.  Above us we heard a scream; we ignored it. And soon
I  was  lost in  the  mechanical  effort of  finding footholds,  handholds,
strength  to  keep  going  with these  soldiers  who  were  in much  better
condition than I.

Finally we reached the  end of the paths and stopped. We were gathered on a
rather gentle  slope that ended, all the way around,  in a steep cliff. And
we had  curved enough  to see, above and  behind us, that a  large group of
Golyny were making their way down the path we had just taken.

I did  not look over the  edge, at first, until  I saw them unwinding their
ropes and  joining them,  end to end,  to make a  much longer  line. Then I
walked toward the edge  and looked down. Only a few hundred meters below, a
valley opened up in the mountainside, a flood of level ground in front of a
high-walled canyon  that bit deep into the cliff. From  there it would be a
gentle descent into the plain. We would be safe.

But first,  there was  the matter of  getting down the cliff.  This time, I
couldn't see  any hope of it  unless we each dangled on  the end of a rope,
something that  I had no experience  with. And even then,  what was to stop
the enemy from climbing down after us?

Fole solved  the dilemma, however. He  sat down a few  meters back from the
edge, in  a place where his  feet could brace against  stone, and he pulled
gloves on his hands. Then he took the rope with only a few meters of slack,
looped it  behind his  back, and gripped  the end of  the rope  in his left
hand, holding the rest of the line tight against his body with his right.

He would be a  stable enough root for the top end of the climbing line; and
if he  were killed or under attack, he would simply  drop the line, and the
enemy would have no way to pursue.

He was also doomed to be killed.

I should have said something to him, perhaps, but there was no time. Da was
quickly giving  me my only lesson in descending a rope,  and I had to learn
well or die from my first mistake. And then Da, carrying the bag of Crofe's
excrement,  was over  the  edge, sitting  on the  rope  as it  slid  by his
buttocks, holding  his own weight precariously and  yet firmly enough as he
descended rapidly to the bottom.

Fole bore the weight  stolidly, hardly seeming to strain. And then the rope
went slack, and immediately  Stone was forcing me to pass the rope under my
buttocks, holding  the rope in gloved hands on  either side. Then he pushed
me  backward over  the cliff,  and I  took a  step into nothingness,  and I
gasped in terror as  I fell far too swiftly, swinging to and fro as if on a
pendulum, the rock wall skimming back and forth in front of my face-- until
the  rope  turned,  and  I faced  instead  the  plain,  which still  looked
incredibly far  below me. And now  I did vomit, though  I had not eaten yet
that day;  the acid  was painful in my  throat and mouth; and  I forgot the
terror of falling long enough to grip the rope tightly and slow my descent,
though it  burned my gloves and  the rope was an  agony of tearing along my
buttocks.

The  ground   loomed  closer,  and  I   could  see  Da  waiting,  beckoning
impatiently. And so I forced myself to ignore the pain of a faster descent,
and fell  more rapidly,  so that when  I hit the  ground I  was jolted, and
sprawled into the grasses.

I lay panting in disbelief that I had made it, relief that I no longer hung
like a spider in  the air. But I could not rest, it  seemed-- Da took me by
the arm  and dragged me away  from the rope that  was now flailing with the
next man's descent.

I rolled onto my back and watched, fascinated, as the man came quickly down
the rope. Now that my ordeal was over, I could see a beauty in a single man
on a twine daring gravity to do its worst-- the poetical kind of experience
that has  long been forgotten on  my gentle homeworld of  Garden, where all
the cliffs  have been turned to gentle slopes,  and where oceans gently lap
at sand  instead of  tearing at rock,  and where men  are as  gentle as the
world they live in.  I am gentle, in fact, which caused me much distress at
the beginning  of my military training,  but which allowed me  to survive a
war and come out of the army with few scars that could not heal.

And as  I lay thinking of the contrast between  my upbringing and the harsh
life on this world, Stone reached the bottom and the next man started down.

When the  soldier was only halfway  down, another climbed onto  the rope at
the top.  It took  me a moment  to realize what  was happening;  then as it
occurred to me that  the Golyny must have nearly reached them, Da and Stone
pulled me back against  the cliff wall, where falling bodies would not land
on me.

The first  soldier reached  the bottom; I saw  it was the one  named Pan, a
brutal-looking man who had  wept most piteously at Crofe's death. The other
soldier  was only  a dozen meters  from the  ground when suddenly  the rope
shuddered and he dropped. He hit the ground in a tangle of arms and legs; I
started to  run out to help  him, but I was held  back. The others were all
looking  up, and  in a  moment I  saw why.  The giant  Fole, made  small by
distance, leaped off the cliff, pulling with him two of the Golyny. A third
enemy fell  a moment later-- he must have lost  his balance in the struggle
on the cliff.

Fole hit the ground  shudderingly, his body cruelly torn by the impact, the
Golyny also  a jumble of  broken bones. Again I  tried to go out  to try to
accomplish something;  again I was held  back; and again I  found they knew
their world  better than I, with my offworld  instincts, could hope to know
it. Stones  hit the ground sharply,  scattering all around us.  One of them
hit the soldier who  already was dying from his relatively shorter fall; it
broke his skull, and he died.

We waited  in the  shadow of the cliff  until nearly dark; then  Da and Pan
rushed  out and  dragged in the  body of  the soldier. Stones  were already
falling around them when they came back; some ricocheted back into the area
where Stone  and I  waited; one hit  me in the  arm, making  a bruise which
ached for some time afterward.

After dark,  Da and Stone  and Pan and I  all went out, and  hunted for the
body of Fole, and dragged him back into the shelter of the cliff.

Then they lit a  fire, and slit the throats of the corpses, and tipped them
downhill so  the blood would flow.  They wiped their hands  in the sluggish
stream and licked their palms as they had for Gokoke. And then they covered
their eyes and duplicated the chant.

As they  went through  the funerary rites,  I looked out  toward the plain.
From above, this area had seemed level with the rest of the plain; in fact,
it was much higher  than the plain, and I could see the faint lights of the
city fires here and there above the jungle. Near us, however, there were no
lights. I  wondered how  far we were  from the outpost  at the  base of the
cliffs where we had left our horses; I also wondered why in hell I had ever
consented to  come along on this expedition.  "An ordinary tour," Crofe had
called it,  and I had not realized that  my understanding of their language
was so insufficient. Nor had I believed that the war between the Golyny and
the Ylymyny was such  a serious matter. After all, it had been going on for
more than three centuries; how could blood stay so hot, so long?

"You look at the plain," said Stone, beside me, his voice a hiss. It struck
me that we  had been together at the base of the  cliff for hours, and this
was the  first word that had  been spoken, except for  the chanting. In the
cities the  Ylymyny were  yarn-spinners and chatterers  and gossipers. Here
they scarcely broke the silence.

"I'm wondering how many days it will take us to reach the city."

Stone glowered. "The city?"

I was surprised that he seemed surprised. "Where else?"

"We've taken a vow," Stone said, and I could detect the note of loathing in
his  voice that I  had come to  expect from  him whenever I  said something
wrong. "We must take Crofe's soul to the sky."

I didn't really understand. "Where's that? How do you reach the sky?"

Stone's chest heaved with the effort of keeping his patience. "The Sky," he
said,  and  then  I did  a  double  take, realizing  that  the  word I  was
translating was  also a  name, the name  of the highest  mountain on Ylymyn
Island.

"You can't be serious," I said. "That's back the way we came."

"There are other ways, and we will take them."

"So will the Golyny!"

"Do you  think that  we don't have  any honor?" cried Stone,  and the sound
roused Da and brought him to us.

"What is it?" Da whispered, and stillness settled in around us again.

"This offworld scum accuses us of cowardice," Stone hissed. Da fingered the
bag around his neck. "Do you?" he asked.

"Nothing of the kind, " I answered. "I don't know what I'm saying to offend
him. I just supposed that it would be pointless to try to climb the highest
mountain on  your island.  There are only  four of us, and  the Golyny will
surely be ahead of us, waiting, won't they?"

"Of course," Da said. "It will be difficult. But we are Crofe's friends."

"Can't we  get help? From the  hundred men, for instance,  who were waiting
for the ambush?"

Da looked  surprised, and  Stone was openly  angry. "We were  there when he
died. They were not," Da answered.

"Are you  a coward?" Stone asked  softly, and I realized  that to Stone, at
least, cowardice  was not something to  be loathed, it was  something to be
cast out, to be  exorcised, to be killed. His hand held a knife, and I felt
myself on  the edge of a dilemma. If I  denied cowardice while under threat
of death, wouldn't that  be cowardice? Was this a lady or the tiger choice?
I stood my ground.  "If you are all there is to be afraid of, no, I'm not,"
I said.

Stone looked at me in surprise for a moment, then smiled grimly and put his
knife back in his  sheath. Pan came to us then, and Da took the opportunity
to hold a council.

It  was short;  it  involved the  choice of  routes, and  I knew  little of
geography and nothing of  the terrain. At the end of it, though, I had more
questions than  ever. "Why are we  doing this for Crofe,  when we didn't do
anything like it for Fole or Gokoke?"

"Because Crofe is Ice,"  he answered, and I stored the non sequitur away to
puzzle over later.

"And what will we do when we reach the Sky?"

Stone stirred  from his seeming slumber and hissed,  "We don't talk of such
things!"

Da hissed back, "It is possible that none but he will reach the Sky, and in
that case, he must know what to do."

"If  he's the  one there, we  can count  on having failed,"  Stone answered
angrily.

Da ignored him and turned to me. "In this bag I hold his last passage, that
which would have become him had he lived, his future self." I nodded. "This
must be  emptied on  the high altar,  so Jass will  know that  Ice has been
returned to him where he can make it whole."

"That's it? Just empty it on the high altar?"

"The difficulty," said Da, "is not in the rite. It is in the getting there.
And you  must also bid farewell  to Crofe's soul, and  break a piece of ice
from the  mountain, and suck it until it melts; and  you must shed your own
blood on the altar.  But most important is to get there. To the topmost top
of the highest mountain in the world."

I did not tell  him that far to the north, on the one continental landmass,
there rose  mountains that would dwarf Sky; instead  I nodded and turned to
sleep on the grass,  my clinical anthropologist's mind churning to classify
these magical behaviors. The homeopathy was obvious; the meaning of ice was
more obscure; and the  use of unpassed excrement as the "last passage" from
the body  was, to my knowledge, unparalleled. But,  as an old professor had
far too  often remarked, "There is no  behavior so peculiar that somewhere,
members in  good standing of the  human race will not  perform it." The bag
around Da's neck reeked. I slept.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

The four of us  (had there been ten only yesterday morning?) set out before
dawn, sidling up the slope toward the mouth of the canyon. We knew that the
enemy  was above  us; we knew  that others  would already have  circled far
ahead, to  intercept us later.  We were burdened with  rations intended for
only a  few days, and  a few weapons and  the rope. I wished  for more, but
said nothing.

The  day was  uneventful. We  simply stayed  in the  bottom of  the canyon,
beside the  rivulet that poured down toward the  plain. It was obvious that
the stream  ran more powerfully at other times:  boulders the size of large
buildings  were scattered along  the canyon  bottom, and no  vegetation but
grass was  able to  grow below the  watermarks on the  canyon walls, though
here and there above them a tree struggled for existence in the rock.

And so  the next day passed, and the next, until  the canyon widened into a
shallow valley, and we  at last reached a place where the rivulet came from
under a  crack in  the rock, and a  hilltop that we climbed  showed that we
were  now on  the  top of  the island,  with  other low  hills  all around,
deceptively gentle-looking,  considering that  they were hidden  behind the
peaks of one of the most savage mountain ranges I had seen.

Only a few peaks were higher than we were, and one of them was the Sky. Its
only  remarkable feature  was its  height. Many  other mountains  were more
dramatic; many others craggier or more pointed at the peak. Indeed, the Sky
was more a giant  hill-- from our distance, at least-- and its ascent would
not be difficult, I thought.

I said  as much to Da, who only smiled grimly  and said, "Easier, at least,
than reaching  it alive."  And I remembered  the Golyny, and  the fact that
somewhere ahead of us  they would be waiting. The canyon we had climbed was
easy enough-- why hadn't they harassed us on the way up?

"If it rains tonight, you will see," Stone answered.

And it  did rain that  night, and I did  see. Or rather I  heard, since the
night was dark. We  camped in the lee of the hill, but the rain drenched us
despite the  rocky outcropping we  huddled under. And then  I realized that
the rain was falling  so heavily that respectable streams were flowing down
the  hill we camped  against-- and it  was no  more than forty  meters from
crown to base. The  rain was heavier than I had ever seen before, and now I
heard the  distant roaring that told me why the  Golyny had not bothered to
harm us. The huge  river was now flowing down the canyon, fed by a thousand
streams like those flowing by our camp.

"What if it had rained while we were climbing? I asked.

"The  Sky would  not hinder  us on  our errand,"  Da answered, and  I found
little  comfort in  that. Who  would have  guessed that a  simple three-day
expedition   into  the   mountains  would   leave  me  trapped   with  such
superstition, depending on them for my survival even as they were depending
on some unintelligible and certainly nonexistent god.

In the  morning I woke at first light to find  that the others were already
awake and  armed to  the teeth, ready  for battle. I hurried  to stretch my
sore  muscles  and get  ready  for the  trip.  Then I  realized what  their
armaments might mean.

"Are they here?"

But no one answered me, and as soon as it was clear I was ready, they moved
forward, keeping  to the  shelter of the  hills, spying out  what lay ahead
before rounding  a bend.  There were no  trees here, only  the quick-living
grass that died in a day and was replaced by its seed in the morning. There
was no  shelter but the rock; and no shade,  either, but at this elevation,
shade was  not necessary. It was  not easy to breathe  with the oxygen low,
but at  least at this elevation the day was not  hot, despite the fact that
Ylymyn  Island was  regularly one  of the  hottest places on  this forsaken
little planet.

For  two  days we  made our  way  toward the  Sky,  and seemed  to make  no
progress-- it  was still distant, on the  horizon. Worse, however, than the
length of  our journey was the fact that we had  to be unrelentingly on the
alert, though  we saw  no sign of the  Golyny. I once asked  (in a whisper)
whether they might have  given up pursuit. Stone only sneered, and Da shook
his head.  It was Pan who whispered to me that  night that the Golyny hated
nothing so  much as the righteousness  of the Ylymyny, knowing  as they did
that it was only  the gods that had made the Ylymyny the greatest people on
earth, and  that only their piety  had won the gods  so thoroughly to their
side. "There  are some,"  Pan said, "who, when  righteousness defeats them,
squat  before the  gods and properly  offer their  souls, and join  us. But
there are others who  can only hate the good, and attack mindlessly against
the  righteous. The  Golyny  are that  kind. All  decent people  would kill
Golyny to preserve the peace of the righteous."

And then  he glanced pointedly at  my splinters and at  my needle. And I as
pointedly glanced  at the bag of excrement around  Da's neck. "What the law
requires  of good  men,  good men  do," I  said, sounding  platitudinous to
myself,  but  apparently  making  the right  impression  on  Pan. His  eyes
widened, and  he nodded in respect. Perhaps I  overdid it, but it gratified
me to  see that he understood that just as  certain rites must be performed
in his  society, certain  acts are taboo  in mine, and among  those acts is
involvement in  the small  wars of nations  on primitive planets.  That his
compulsions were  based on  mindless superstition while mine  were based on
long years of experience in xenocontact was a distinction I hardly expected
him  to grasp,  and so  I said  nothing about  it. The  result was  that he
treated me with more  respect; with awe, in fact. And, noticing that, Stone
asked me  quietly as  we walked the  next day, "What  have you  done to the
young soldier?"

"Put the fear of god into him."

I  had  meant to  be  funny. Odd,  how  a man  can  be careful  in all  his
pronouncements, and then forget everything he knows as a joke comes to mind
and he  impulsively tells it. Stone was furious;  it took Da's strength and
Pan's, too,  to keep  him from attacking  me, which would  surely have been
fatal to him-- rope-climbing  I didn't know, but the ways of murder are not
strange to me, though  I don't pursue them for pleasure. At last I was able
to explain  that I  hadn't understood the  implications of my  statement in
their language, that I  was transliterating and certain words had different
meanings and  so on and so on. We were still  discussing this when a flight
of arrows  ended the conversation and drove all of  us to cover except Pan,
who had an arrow in him and died there in the open while we watched.

It was difficult to avoid feeling that his death had been somehow my fault;
and as  Da and  Stone discussed the  matter and confessed that  they had no
choice  this time  but to  leave the  body, committing  a sin to  allow the
greater good  of fulfilling the vow to Crofe.  I realized that omitting the
rites of  death for Pan grieved  me almost as much as  his death. I have no
particular belief in immortality;  the notion that the dead linger to watch
what happens  to their  remains is silly  to me. Nevertheless,  there is, I
believe, a difference between knowing that a person is dead and emotionally
unconstructing the  system of  relationships that had  included the person.
Pan, obscure  as the young man  was, ugly and brutal  as his face had been,
was nevertheless the man I liked best of my surviving companions.

And thinking  of that, it occurred  to me that of the  ten that had set out
only  a week  before, only  three of us  remained; I,  who could not  use a
weapon while in the company of the others, and they, who had to travel more
slowly and so risk their lives even more because of me.

"Leave me behind," I  said. "Once I'm alone, I can defend myself as I will,
and you can move faster."

Stone's  eyes leaped  at  the suggestion,  but  Da firmly  shook his  head.
"Never. Crofe charged us all that we would keep you with us."

"He didn't know the situation we'd be in."

"Crofe knew,"  Da whispered. "A man  dies in two days  here without wisdom.
And you have no wisdom."

If  he  meant  knowledge  of  what  might  be  edible  in  this  particular
environment, he  was right enough; and when I saw  that Da had no intention
of leaving  me, I decided to continue with them. Better  to move on than do
nothing. But before we left our temporary shelter (with Pan's corpse slowly
desiccating behind  us) I taught Stone and Da how  to use the splinters and
the needle, in  case I was killed. Then no law would  be broken, as long as
they  returned the  weapons to  the corporation.  For once Stone  seemed to
approve of something I had done.

Now we  moved even more slowly, more stealthily, and  yet the Sky seemed to
loom closer now, at last; we were in the foothills. Each hill we approached
hid the Sky behind  its crest sooner. And the sense of waiting death became
overpowering.

At  night I  took my  turn watching,  with Pan  gone. Technically it  was a
violation--  I  was aiding  them  in  their war  effort.  But  it was  also
survival, since the Golyny had little use for offworlders-- SCM Corporation
had already made four  attempts to get a foothold with them, and they would
not hear of it.  It was maddening to have the ability to save lives and for
the sake of larger purposes have to refrain from using that ability.

My watch ended, and I woke Da. But instead of letting me sleep, he silently
woke Stone  as well, and in  the darkness we moved  as silently as possible
away  from our  camp.  This time  we were  not  heading for  the mountain--
instead, we were paralleling it, traveling by starlight (which is almost no
light at  all), and I guessed  that Da intended us  to pass by our would-be
killers and perhaps ascend the mountain by another route.

Whether we passed them  or not, I didn't know. At dawn, however, when there
was  light enough  to see  the ground,  Da began  running, and Stone  and I
followed. The walking had been bad, but I had gradually grown inured to it;
the running brought out every latent protest in my muscles. It was not easy
loping over  even ground, either. It was a  shattering run over rocks, down
small ravines,  darting over hills  and across streams. I  was exhausted by
noon,  ready for  our  brief stop.  But we  took  no stop.  Da did  spare a
sentence for me: "We're ahead of them and must stay ahead."

As  we ran,  however,  an idea  came to  me,  one that  seemed pathetically
obvious once I  had thought of it. I was not allowed  to summon any help to
further a war effort-- but surely getting to the top of the mountain was no
war effort. Our lander would never descend into enemy fire, but now that we
were in  the open, the lander could come, could pick  us up, could carry us
to the top of the mountain before the enemy suspected we were there.

I  suggested that. Stone  only spat on  the ground  (a vile thing,  in this
world,  where for  some obscure  reason water  is worshipped, though  it is
plentiful everywhere  except the Great Desert far  to the north of Ylymyn),
while Da  shook his  head. "Spirits fly  to the Sky;  men climb  to it," he
said, and  once again religion had stymied  me. Superstitions were going to
kill us  yet, meaningless  rules that should  surely change in  the face of
such dire need.

But  at nightfall  we were at  the foot of  a difficult  cliff. I saw  at a
glance that this was  not the easy ascent that the mountain had seemed from
the distance. Stone looked  surprised, too, as he surveyed the cliff. "This
ascent is not right," he said softly.

Da nodded. "I know it. This is the west face, which no one climbs."

"Is it impossible?" I asked.

"Who knows?"  Da answered. "The other  ways are so much  easier, no one has
ever tried this  one. So we go this way, where they  don't look for us, and
somewhere we  move to the north  or south, to take  an easier way when they
don't expect us."

Then Da began to climb. I protested, "The sun's already set."

"Good," he answered. "Then they won't see us climbing."

And so began our  climb to the Sky. It was difficult, and for once they did
not  press on ahead  and then wait  impatiently for  me to come.  They were
hampered as I was by darkness and strangeness, and the night made us equals
at  last. It  was an  empty equality,  however. Three  times that  night Da
whispered that he had reached a place in the cliff impossible to scale, and
I had  to back  up, trying to  find the holds  I had left  a moment before.
Descending a mountain is  harder than ascending it. Climbing you have eyes,
and it  is your fingers that reach ahead of  you. Descending only your toes
can hunt, and I  was wearing heavy boots. We had wakened early, long before
dawn,  and we  climbed  until dawn  again began  to  light the  sky.  I was
exhausted, and  Stone and Da also  seemed to droop with  the effort. But as
the light  gathered, we came to  a shoulder of the  mountain, a place where
for  hundreds  of meters  the  slope was  no  more than  fifteen or  twenty
degrees, and we threw ourselves to the ground and slept.

I woke  because of the  stinging of my hands,  which in the noon  sun I saw
were caked with blood  that still, here and there, oozed to the surface. Da
and Stone  still slept. Their hands were not so  injured as mine; they were
more used to heavy work with their hands. Even the weights I had lifted had
been equipped with cushioned handles.

I sat  up and  looked around. We  were still alone  on our  shoulder of the
mountain, and I gazed down the distance we had climbed. We had accomplished
much in the darkness, and I marveled at the achievement of it; the hills we
had run  through the day before  were small and far,  and I guessed that we
might be as much as a third of the way to the peak.

Thinking that,  I looked toward the mountain,  and immediately kicked Da to
waken him.

Da, bleary-eyed, looked where  I nodded, and saw the failure of our night's
work. Though none of  the Golyny were near us, it was plain that from their
crags and promontories they  could see us. They were not ahead of us on the
west slope, but rather  they stood as if to guard every traverse that might
take us to the  safer, easier routes. And who knew-- perhaps the Golyny had
explored the west face and knew that no man could climb it.

Da sighed, and Stone  silently shook his head and broke out the last of the
food, which  we had  been eating sparingly  for days longer  than it should
have lasted.

"What now?" I whispered (odd how the habits, once begun, cannot be broken),
and Da answered, "Nothing now. Just ahead. Up the west face. Better unknown
dangers than known ones."

I looked  back down into the valleys and hills  below us. Stone spat again.
"Offworlder," he said, "even  if we could forsake our vow, they are waiting
at the bottom of the cliff by now to kill us as we come down."

"Then let me call  my lander. When the prohibition was made, no one knew of
flying machines."

Da chuckled. "We have  always known of flying machines. We simply had none.
But we also knew  that such machines could not carry a penitent or a suitor
or a vowkeeper to the Sky."

I clutched at straws. "When we reach there, what then?"

"Then we shall have died with the vow kept."

"Can't I call the lander then, to take us off the mountain?"

They looked  at each other, and then Da nodded  to me. I immediately hunted
in the pockets of my coat for the radio; I could not hope to reach the city
from  here,  but in  less  than  an hour  the  orbiting  starship would  be
overhead, and  would relay my  message. I tried calling  the starship right
then, in case it was already over the horizon. It was not, and so we headed
again for the crags.

Now the  climb was  worse, because of  our weariness from  the night before
rather than from any greater difficulty in the rocks themselves. My fingers
ached; the  skin on my palms stung with each contact  with the rock. Yet we
pressed  ahead, and  the west face  was not  unclimbable; even at  our slow
pace, we  soon left the shoulder  of the rock far  behind us. Indeed, there
were many  places where  we scrambled on  natural stairways of  rock; other
places where ledges let  us rest; until we reached an overhang that blocked
us completely.

There  was no tool  in this metalless  world that  could have helped  us to
ignore gravity and climb spiderlike upside down to the lip of the overhang.
We had no choice  but to traverse, and now I realized how wise our enemies'
plan had been.  We would have to move to left or  right, to north or south,
and they would be waiting.

But, given  no choice, we took the only alternative  there was. We took the
route under  the overhang that  slanted upward-- toward the  south. And now
Stone took the lead,  coldly explaining that Da bore Crofe's soul, and they
had vowed  to Crofe to keep me alive; therefore  he was most expendable. Da
nodded gravely, and I  did not protest. I like life, and around any turn or
over any obstacle, an arrow might be waiting.

Another surprise:  here and there in  the shelter of the  rock the cold air
had preserved  a bit of snow.  There was no snowcap  visible from below, of
course;  but this  was summer, and  only this  high an altitude  could have
preserved snow at all in such a climate.

It  was nearing  nightfall,  and I  suggested we  sleep  for the  night. Da
agreed, and  so we huddled against  the wall of the  mountain, the overhang
above us,  and two meters away a dropoff into  nothing. I lay there looking
at a  single star  that winked above  my head, and  it is a  measure of how
tired I was that  it was not until morning that I realized the significance
of that.

Tomorrow,  Da  assured me,  we  would either  reach  the Sky  or be  killed
trying-- we  were that  close. And so  as I talked  to the  starship on its
third  pass since  I had  asked for  the lander  in the early  afternoon, I
briefly explained when we would be there.

This  time,  however,  they  had Tack,  the  manager  of our  corporation's
operations on  this world,  patched in from  his radio in the  city. And he
began to berate me  for my stupidity. "What the hell kind of way is this to
fulfill your corporate responsibilities!"  crackled his voice. "Running off
to  fulfill some  stinking little  superstition with  a bunch  of stone-age
savages and trying to  get killed in the process!" He went on like that for
some time--  almost five minutes--  before I overrode him  and informed the
starship that under the terms of my contract with the corporation they were
obliged to give me  support as requested, up to and including an evacuation
from the top of a mountain, and the manager could take his objections and--

They heard,  and they agreed to  comply, and I lay  there trying to cool my
anger. Tack didn't understand, couldn't understand. He hadn't been this far
with me,  hadn't seen Fole's set face as he volunteered  to die so the rest
could descend  the cliff; hadn't watched the agony  of indecision as Da and
Stone decided  to leave Pan; hadn't  any way of knowing  why I was going to
reach the top of the Sky for Crofe's sake--

Not for Crofe's sake,  dammit; for mine, for ours. Crofe was dead, and they
couldn't help him at all by smearing his excrement on a rock. And suddenly,
remembering what would be done when we reached the top of the mountain-- if
we did-- I laughed. All this, to rub a dead man's shit on a stone--

And  Stone seized  me  by the  throat and  made as  if to  cast me  off the
mountain. Da and I struggled, and I looked in Stone's eyes and saw my death
there. "Your  vow," Da whispered sharply, and  Stone at last relented, slid
away from me.

"What did  you say in your  deviltalk!" he demanded, and  I realized that I
had spoken  Empire to the starship, then paused a  moment and laughed. So I
explained, more politely than Tack had, what Tack had said.

Da  glared   Stone  into  silence   when  I  was  through,   and  then  sat
contemplatively for a long time before he spoke.

"It's true, I suppose," he said, "that we're superstitious."

I  said  nothing.  Stone   said  nothing  only  by  exercising  his  utmost
self-control.

"But true  and false have nothing  to do with love  and hate. I love Crofe,
and I will do  what I vowed to do, what he would have done for another Ice;
what, perhaps, he might have done for me even though I am not Ice."

And  then,  with  the  question  settled  that easily  (and  therefore  not
settled--  indeed, not  even understood  at all),  we slept, and  I thought
nothing of the star that winked directly overhead.

Morning  was dismal,  with clouds below  us rollIng  in from the  south. It
would be a  storm; and Da warned me that there might  be mist as the clouds
rose and tumbled around the mountains. We had to hurry.

We had  not traveled far, however,  when the ledge above  us and the one we
walked  on broadened,  separated,  opened out  into the  gentle  slope that
everywhere but  on the  west face led  to the peak  of the  Sky. And there,
gathered below us, were three or four dozen Golyny, just waking. We had not
been seen,  but there was no  conceivable way to walk  ten steps out of the
last shelter of the  ledge without being noticed; and even though the slope
was gentle,  it was still four  or five hundred meters  up the slope to the
peak, Da assured me.

"What can we do?" I whispered. "They'll kill us easily."

And indecision  played on  Da's face, expressing  much, even though  he was
silent.

We watched  as the Golyny opened their food and ate  it; watched as some of
them wrestled  or pulled sticks. They  looked like any other  men, rowdy in
the  absence of  women  and when  there was  no serious  work to  do. Their
laughter was  like any other men's  laughter, and their games  looked to be
fun. I forgot myself,  and found myself silently betting on one wrestler or
another, silently picturing myself in the games, and knowing how I would go
about winning. And so an hour passed, and we were no closer to the peak.

Stone looked  grim; Da looked desperate;  and I have no  idea how I looked,
though I  suspect that  because of my  involvement with the  Golyny games I
appeared disinterested to my companions. Perhaps that was why at last Stone
took me roughly by the sleeve and spun me toward him.

"A game, isn't it! That's all it is to you!"

Shaken out of my contemplation, I did not understand what was happening.

"Crofe was  the greatest man in a  hundred generations!" Stone hissed. "And
you care nothing for bringing him to heaven!"

"Stone," Da hissed.

"This scum acts as if Crofe were not his friend!"

"I hardly knew him," I said honestly but unwisely.

"What does that have  to do with friendship!" Stone said angrily. "He saved
your  life a  dozen times,  made us  take you  in and  accept you  as human
beings, though you followed no law!"

I  follow a  law,  I would  have said,  except that  in our  exhaustion and
Stone's grief at the  failure of our mission, we had raised our voices, and
already  the Golyny  were  arming, were  rushing toward  us,  were silently
nocking arrows to bows and coming for the kill.

How is  it possible that stupidity  should end our lives  when our enemies'
cleverest stratagems had not,  I thought in despair; but at that moment the
part  of  my  mind   that  occasionally  makes  itself  useful  by  putting
intelligent thoughts  where they can be used reminded me  of the star I had
seen as  I lay under  the overhang last night.  A star-- and I  had seen it
directly overhead  where the  overhang had to  be. Which meant  there was a
hole in the overhang, perhaps a chimney that could be climbed.

I  quickly  told Da  and  Stone, and  now,  the argument  forgotten in  our
desperate situation,  Stone wordlessly  took his bow  and all his  and Da's
arrows and sat to wait for the enemy to come.

"Go," he said, "and climb to the peak if you can."

It hurt,  for some  reason, that the  man who hated  me should  take it for
granted  that he  would die  in order to  save my  life. Not that  I fooled
myself that  he valued my life,  but still, I would  live for a few moments
more because  he was  about to die.  And, inexplicably, I  felt an emotion,
briefly, that can only be described as love. And that love embraced also Da
and Pan, and I  realized that while Crofe was only a businessman that I had
enjoyed  dealing   with,  these  others  were,   after  all,  friends.  The
realization that  I felt  emotion toward these  barbarians (yes, that  is a
patronizing attitude,  but I have never  known even an anthropologist whose
words  or acts did  not confess that  he felt  contempt for those  he dealt
with),  that  I  loved  them,  was  shocking yet  somehow  gratifying;  the
knowledge that  they kept  me alive only  out of duty  to a dead  man and a
superstition was expectable, but somehow reason for anguish.

All this  took less than a moment, however, there on  the ledge, and then I
turned with Da and raced back along the ledge toward where we had spent the
night. It  had seemed  like only a  short way; I  kept slowing  for fear we
would miss  the spot in our hurry. But when we  reached it, I recognized it
easily, and yes, there  was indeed a chimney in the rock, a narrow one that
was almost perfectly vertical, but one that could possibly lead us near the
top of the Sky; a path to the peak that the enemy would not be looking for.

We stripped  off our  extra gear: the  rope, which had not  been used since
Fole died  to let us descend  it, the blankets, the  weapons, the canvas. I
kept only  my splinters  and needle-- they must  be on my body  when I died
(though I  was momentarily conceiving that I might  win through with Da and
survive all this, already the lander would be hovering high above the peak)
--to  prove that  I  had not  broken the  law; otherwise  my name  would be
stricken from  the ELB records in dishonor, and  all my comrades and fellow
frontliners would know I had failed in one of the most basic trusts.

A roar  of triumph was carried  along the rock, and  we knew that Stone was
dead, his position overrun, and we had at best ten minutes before they were
upon us. Da began kicking our gear off the edge of the cliff, and I helped.
A keen eye could still tell that here we had disturbed the ground more than
elsewhere; but  it was, we hoped, enough to confuse  them for just a little
longer.

And then we began  to climb the chimney. Da insisted that I climb first; he
hoisted me  into the crack, and I shimmied  upward, bracing my back against
one wall and my hands and feet against the other. Then I stopped, and using
my leg as a handhold, he, too, clambered into the split in the rock.

Then we  climbed, and the chimney  was longer than we  had thought, the sky
more distant.  Our progress  was slow, and  every motion kicked  down rocks
that  clattered onto  the ledge. We  had not  counted on that--  the Golyny
would notice  the falling rocks, would  see where we were,  and we were not
yet high enough to be impossible for arrows to reach.

And even  as I  realized that, it came  true. We saw the  flash of clothing
passing under the chimney;  though I could make out no detail, I could tell
even in the silence  that we had been found. We struggled upward. What else
could we do?

And the  first arrow came up  the shaft. Shooting vertically  is not easy--
much must be unlearned. But the archer was good. And the third arrow struck
Da, angling upward into his calf.

"Can you go on?" I asked.

"Yes," he answered, and I climbed higher, with him following, seeming to be
unslowed by the wound.

But the archer was not through, and the seventh rushing sound ended, not in
a clatter, but in  the dull sound of stone striking flesh. Involuntarily Da
uttered a cry. Where I was I could see no wound, of course.

"Are you hit?"

"Yes," heanswered.  "In the groin.  An artery, I believe.  I'm losing blood
too quickly."

"Can you go on?"

"No."

And using  the last of his strength to hold himself  in place with his legs
alone  (which must  have  been agony  to his  wounds), he  took the  bag of
Crofe's excrement  from his neck and  hung it carefully on  my foot. In our
cramped situation, nothing else was possible.

"I charge you," he said in pain, "to take it to the altar."

"It might fall," I said honestly.

"It will not if you vow to take it to the altar."

And because Da was  dying from an arrow that might have struck me, and also
because of  Stone's death and Pan's  and Fole's and, yes,  Crofe's, I vowed
that I  would do it. And  when I had said that, Da  let go and plunged down
the shaft.

I climbed as quickly  as I could, knowing that the arrows might easily come
again, as  in fact they  did. But I was  higher all the time,  and even the
best archer couldn't reach me.

I  was only a  dozen meters from  the top,  carefully balancing the  bag of
excrement from  my foot  as I climbed  (every motion more  painful than the
last), when it occurred  to me that Da was dead, and everyone else as well.
What  was to  stop  me now  from dropping  the  bag, climbing  to  the top,
signaling the  lander to  me, and climbing  safely aboard? To  preserve the
contents of  a man's bowels and risk my life  to perform a meaningless rite
with it  was absurd. No damage  could be done by  my failure to perform the
task.  No one  would know,  in fact,  that I  had vowed  to do  it. Indeed,
completing the vow could easily be construed as unwarranted interference in
planetary affairs.

Why didn't  I drop  the bag? There are  those who claim that  I was insane,
believing the religion (these  are they who claim that I believe it still);
but that is not true. I knew rationally that dead men do not watch the acts
of the  living, that vows made  to the dead are  not binding, that my first
obligation was  to myself and the  corporation, and certainly not  to Da or
Crofe.

But regardless  of my rational process,  even as I thought  of dropping the
bag I  felt the utter wrongness  of it. I could not  do it and still remain
myself. This is mystical,  perhaps, but there was nowhere in my mind that I
could  fail to  fulfill  my oath  and still  live.  I have  broken  my word
frequently for  convenience-- I  am, after all,  a modern man.  But in this
case, at that time,  despite my strong desire for survival, I could not tip
my foot downward and let the bag drop.

And after that moment of indecision, I did not waver.

I reached  the top utterly exhausted,  but sat on the  brink of the chimney
and reached down to  remove the bag from my foot. The leaning forward after
so much  exertion in  an inexorably vertical position  made me lightheaded;
the bag  almost slipped from my grasp, almost fell; I  caught it at the end
of my  toe and pulled it, trembling, to my  lap. It was light, surprisingly
light. I set it on the ground and pulled myself out of the chimney, crawled
wearily a  meter or  two away from the  edge of the cliff,  and then looked
ahead of me.  There was the peak, not a hundred meters  away. On it I could
easily see  an altar hewn out of stone. The design  was not familiar to me,
but it could serve the purpose, and it was the only artifact in sight.

But between me. and  the peak was a gentle downward slope before the upward
slope began  again, leading to the altar. The  slopes were all gentle here,
but  I realized  that a  thin coat  of ice  covered all the  rocks; indeed,
covered the  rock only a few meters on from me.  I didn't understand why at
the time;  afterward the men in  the lander told me  that for half an hour,
while I was in the chimney on the west face, a mist had rolled over the top
of the peak, and when it had left, only a few minutes before I surfaced, it
had left the film of ice.

But ice was part  of my vow, part of the rite, and I scraped some up, broke
some off with the handle of my needle, and put it in my mouth.

It was  dirty with the grit  of the rock, but it was  cold and it was water
and I  felt better for having  tasted it. And I  felt nothing but relief at
having completed  part of my vow-- it did not  seem incongruous at the time
that I should be engaging in magic.

Then I  struggled to  my feet and  began to walk clumsily  across the space
between  me  and  the  peak, holding  the  bag  in  my  hands and  slipping
frequently on the icy rocks.

I heard  shouting below me. I  looked down and saw  the Golyny on the south
slope, hundreds  of meters away. They  would not be able  to reach the peak
before me. I took some comfort in that even as the arrows began to hunt for
my range.

They found it, and when I tried to move to the north to avoid their fire, I
discovered that the Golyny  on that side had been alerted by the noise, and
they, too, were firing at me.

I had  thought I was traveling  as fast as I could  already; now I began to
run toward the peak. Yet running made me slip more, and I scarcely made any
faster progress than I  had before. It occurs to me now that perhaps it was
just that irregular pattern of running quickly and then falling, rising and
running again,  and falling again,  that saved my life;  surely it confused
the archers.

A shadow passed over me twice as I made the last run to the peak; perhaps I
realized  that it  was the lander,  perhaps not.  I could have,  even then,
opted for  a rescue. Instead, I fell again and  dropped the bag, watched it
slide a dozen meters down the south slope, where the Golyny were only a few
dozen meters  away and closing in  (although they, too, were  slowed by the
ice).

And so  I descended into the arrows and retrieved the  bag. I was struck in
the  thigh and in  the side; they  burned with  pain, and I  almost fainted
then, from the sheer  surprise of it. Somehow primitive weapons seem wrong;
they shouldn't be  able to do damage to a modem man.  The shock of the pain
they bring is therefore  all the greater. Yet I did not faint. I got up and
struggled  back up  the slope,  and now I  was only  a little way  from the
altar, it was just  ahead, it was within a few steps, and at last I fell on
it, my  wounds throwing  blood onto the  ground and onto  the altar itself.
Vaguely I  realized that another part of the  rite had thus been completed,
and  as the  lander came  to rest  behind me,  I took  the bag,  opened it,
scooped out the still-damp contents, and smeared them on the altar.

Three  corporation men  reached me  then, and,  obeying the law,  the first
thing they  did was  check my belt  for the needle and  the splinters. Only
when they  were certain  that they had not  been used did they  turn to the
Golyny and flip their own splinters downhill. They exploded in front of the
enemy, and they screamed in terror and fell back, tumbling and running down
the rocks.  None had  been killed, though  I now treasure the  wish that at
least one  of them might have  slipped and broken his  neck. It was enough,
though,  that they  saw that  demonstration of  power; the  corporation had
never given the Golyny a taste of modern warfare until then.

If  my needle  had  been fired,  or if  a  splinter had  been  missing, the
corporation men  would, of course, have killed me on  the spot. Law is law.
As it was, however, they lifted me and carried me from the altar toward the
lander.  But I did  not forget. "Farewell,  Crofe, "  I said, and  then, as
delirium took over, they tell me I also bade good-bye to all the others, to
every one  of them,  a hundred times over,  as the lander took  me from the
peak back to the city, back to safety.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

In  two weeks  I was  recovered enough  to receive  visitors, and  my first
visitor was  Pru, the titular head  of the assembly of  Ylymyn. He was very
kind. He  quietly told  me that after I  had been back for  three days, the
corporation finally let slip  what I had told them when I requested rescue;
the Ylymyny  had sent a very  large (and therefore safe)  party to discover
more.  They found  the mutilated  bodies of  Fole and  the soldier  who had
fallen  just before  him; discovered  the dried  and frozen corpse  of Pan;
found  no trace  of Da  or Stone; but  then reached  the altar and  saw the
bloodstains upon  it, and the fresh excrement stains,  and that was why Pru
had come to me to squat before me and ask me one question.

"Ask," I said.

"Did you bid farewell to Crofe?"

I did  not wonder  how they knew  it was Crofe  we had climbed  the peak to
honor-0 obviously, only Crofe was "Ice" and therefore worthy of the rite.

"I did," I said.

Tears came  into the old man's  eyes, and his jaw  trembled, and he took my
hand as he squatted by the bed, his tears falling upon my skin.

"Did you," he asked, and his voice broke, and then he began again, "did you
grant him companions? "

I did not have to ask what he meant; that was how well I understood them by
then. "I  also bade farewell to the others," and I  named them, and he wept
louder and kissed my  hand and then chanted with his eyes covered for quite
some time. When he was done, he reached up and touched my eyes.

"May your eyes always see behind the forest and the mountain," he said, and
then he  touched my lips, and  my ears, and my navel,  and my groin, and he
said other words. And then he left. And I slept again.

In three weeks Tack  came to visit me and found me awake and unable to make
any more  excuses not to see  him. I had expected him  to be stern at best.
Instead, he beamed and  held out a hand, which I took gratefully. I was not
to be tried after all.

"My man," he said,  "my good man, I couldn't wait any longer. Whenever I've
tried to  see you, they've told me you were asleep  or busy or whatnot, but
dammit, man, there's only so much waiting a man can take when he's ready to
bust with pride."

He was  overdoing it, of course, as he  overdid everything, but the message
was clear and pleasant enough. I was to be honored, not disgraced; I was to
receive a decoration, in  fact, and a substantial raise in pay. I was to be
made chief of liaison  for the whole planet; I was, if he had the power, to
be appointed god.

In fact, he said, the natives had already done so.

"Appointed me god?" I asked.

"They've been holding festivals and prayer meetings and whatall for a week.
I don't know what you told old Pru, but you are golden property to them. If
you told them all  to march into the ocean, I swear they'd do it. Don't you
realize what  an opportunity this is?  You could have screwed  it up on the
mountain, you  know that. One false  move and that would  have been it. But
you turned  a potential disaster-- and  one not entirely of  your making, I
know that-- you turned  that disaster into the best damn contact point with
a xenosociety I've ever seen. Do you realize what this means? You've got to
get busy  right away, as soon as you can, get  the contracts signed and the
work  begun while  there's  still this  groundswell of  affection  for you.
Shades of  the White  Messiah the Indians  thought Cortes was--  but that's
history,  and you've  made history this  time, I  promise." And on  he went
until  at last,  unable to  bear it  anymore, I  tried-- indeed,  I'm still
trying-- to  explain to him that what had happened  on the mountain was not
for the corporation.

"Nonsense,"  he   said.  "Couldn't  have  done   anything  better  for  the
corporation if you'd stayed up a week trying to think of it."

I tried again. I told him about the men who had died, what I owed to them.

"Sentiment. Sentiment's good in  a man. Nothing to risk your life over, but
you were tired."

And I tried again,  fool that I was, and explained about the vow, and about
my feelings as I  decided to carry the thing through to its conclusion. And
at last  Tack fell silent and  thought about what I  had said, and left the
room.

That was when the visits with the psychologists began, and while they found
me, of  course, perfectly competent mentally  (trust Tack to overreact, and
they knew it), when I requested that I be transferred from the planet, they
found a  loophole that let me  go without breaking contract  or losing pay.
But the  word was out throughout the corporation that  I had gone native on
Worthing,  that I had  actually performed  an arcane rite  involving blood,
ice, a  mountain peak, and a dead man's  half-digested dinner. I could bear
the rumors of madness. It is the laughter that is unbearable, because those
who cannot dream of the climb to the mountain, who did not know the men who
died for me and for Crofe-- how can they help but laugh?

And how can I help but hate them?

Which is  why I  request again my  retirement from the  corporation. I will
accept half retirement, if that is necessary. I'll accept no retirement, in
fact, if  the record  can only stay  clear. I will not  accept a retirement
that lists me as  mentally incompetent. I will not accept a retirement that
forces me to live anywhere but on Ylymyn Island.

I know  that it is forbidden,  but these are unusual  circumstances. I will
certainly be accepted there; I will acquit myself with dignity; I wish only
to live  out my life with  people who understand honor  perhaps better than
any others I have known of.

It  is absurd,  I know. You  will deny my  request, I  know, as you  have a
hundred times before. But I hoped that if you knew my story, knew as best I
could tell  it the whys  behind my determination to  leave the corporation,
that perhaps  you would understand why I have not  been able to forget that
Pru told me, "Now  you are Ice, too; and now your soul shall be set free in
the Sky." It is  not the hope of a life after death--  I have no such hope.
It is  the hope that at  my death honorable men will  go to some trouble to
bid me farewell.

Indeed, it is no  hope at all, but rather a certainty. I, like every modern
man, have clung since  childhood to a code, to a law that struggled to give
a purpose to life. All the laws are rational; all achieve a purpose.

But on Ylymyn, where the laws were irrational and the purposes meaningless,
I found  another thing, the thing behind the law,  the thing that is itself
worth clinging to regardless of the law, the thing that takes even mad laws
and makes them holy. And by all that's holy, let me go back and cling to it
again.

THE END